They tend not to live amongst us, but in their own towns. Sometimes they are sons and daughters of people we might know, but when I ask around, I do not meet many with close links.

I know two generals and an admiral socially - friendships established through my day job. But then quite suddenly, the military are in our front room. They enter through our computer and TV screens in times of death.

The war in Afghanistan is eternally remote and yet eternally present. Some of it is fought from somewhere in the US with man-less drones but much of it is hand-to-hand, boot to boot, very, very far away. It’s a  nasty thing, as nasty as its accompaniment in Iraq, and we have been at it for twice the period that our parents and grandparents fought the second world war.

It is when a soldier goes berserk and kills 16 Afghan civilians, nine of them children, or a when direct hit steals six British lives from an “impregnable” armoured vehicle, that war lurches back into awareness.

So little does the war play upon our normal lives that so long as it is distant and foreign we can apparently live with it forever.

But the US soldier’s killing of so many is beyond war, and the worst single incident of its kind in modern times. Perhaps this time these killings may wake us and make us wonder…what on earth are we doing?

How loud will that question ring, and for how long shall we hear it? In a ghastly way that may depend upon how many the ‘enemy’ now kill in reply (we don’t really call them that; the ‘Taliban’ is perhaps more easily mysterious and distant).

A sort of end has been declared: 2014/15. But the feel is of dangerous drift. The cost is vast in cash, lives, and resolution. It seems, this bleak morning, that the bloodletting will intensify. If it does, will the war manage to retain its customary and convenient remoteness, or have we reached a new moment? I suspect we may have.

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Such a simple idea: invade Iraq, remove the tyrant and unleash democracy. Nearly ten years and a trillion dollars later, Western forces, now reduced to a sizable rump of American troops, are coming home. They will all be gone from Iraq in 19 days.

What are they leaving behind? A vast number of Western ‘mercenaries’ employed by assorted security companies; a country more divided, more insecure, and more uncertain in its destiny, and an Iran that holds a regional sway greater than at any time since the Persian Empire ruled supreme a century ago.

One senses that there will be few celebrating; indeed one wonders whether Messrs Bush and Blair will even notice the moment. History is unlikely to be generous about the Iraq adventure; the word oil is unlikely to be far from its evaluation.

I have never been more frightened in any theatre of war. To be on the ground was to be adorned in a flak jacket and to feel very personally threatened at all times. I was there perhaps a dozen times. I heard the car bombs, saw the tell tale plumes of black smoke rising into the sky.

I was there before, when the odious Saddam ruled supreme. After he’d gone, I saw the severed limbs, the blood, and the corpses of some who died. From Amman and Damascus to Glasgow and Birmingham, I met some of the millions displaced, and tried and failed to remain the objective journalist that I am paid to be.

And beyond, what of the four and half thousand American families, the hundreds of British, Dutch, Canadian, Nepalese families who lost a loved one, or the thousands who have lost a limb and their mental well being? What will history say to them?

The oil is flowing; regional defence sales are rising. But is the region a better place?

We must move on, we have new wars to fight, inside the eurozone, in the trading rooms, of Shanghai, New York and London. Oh, and there is Afghanistan still flaming, Pakistan besides; the Arab Spring still raging and uncertain.

What a time for leadership, unity, and purpose. We, the first generation in a hundred years to live life without a World War are blessed. But will history judge that we used our blessing well?

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So, Tony Blair‘s Head of M15 opposed the “war on terror”. Eliza Manningham-Buller also opposed the invasion of Iraq. I wonder whether she said so at the time. Her confession comes in a Reith lecture to be broadcast next week – but it is already in the can. One wonders whether by the time the Iraq Inquiry reports there will be anyone to be found beyond the former  Prime Minister and his old friend George W Bush, to defend either the “war on terror”, or the invasion.

And yet, beyond Robin Cook and a tiny handful of other political rebels, there were only two “officials” who put their beliefs on the line at the time. The redoubtable Elizabeth Wilmshurst – number two in the Foreign Office legal department – and Carne Ross, a senior UK diplomat at the UN – both paid the ultimate price in both nobility and pensions, in resigning over it all. Both were fast rising stars in their departments, none of their superiors saw fit to join them.

Carne Ross’s book, The Leaderless Revolution, is published this week. I have read it, and it is a remarkable call to arms. Ross believes the present domestic and international “system” cannot deliver the change the world urgently needs and calls on the individual citizen to play his and her part as never before.

The Iraq war is far from over. The killing continues apace – 250 civilians a month according to latest figures from Baghdad. A suicide bomber killed 29 in the capital’s biggest mosque last weekend alone. Just before the invasion, Tony Blair summoned four of the UK’s top Iraq analysts to Number 10 to advise him. All four counselled strongly against going ahead with it. As they left, after a solid one and a half hours of deliberation, Mr Blair is reported by one of the academics as saying: “But you do agree, don’t you, that Saddam is a very bad man?”

Another “very bad man” is still lurking about in Libya today. I first encountered Gaddafi in the 1970s. His was a Green Book-supported cult of personality – but a strangely egalitarian one. Libyans initially did rather well out of him – he spread the wealth about and spent on schooling and health. But as with all such cults, the green turned to brown, and eventually to black, tinged with the red blood of those who opposed his dictatorship.

Once again, the west allowed itself to become obsessed with another “very bad man” with oil. As our own Lindsey Hilsum has observed, the Libyan matter may not end easily or soon and could yet be messy. The rather nicer man, King-Al Kalifa of Bahrain, whom I found Tony Blair taking tea with in Sharmel Sheikh when I went to interview him there on the last day of 2005, has been left alone to bludgeon some of his country’s people and their doctors back into order. The US has this week rewarded him by extending the rental on Bahrain’s bunkering facilities for the US navy until 2016.

We are left with the son of another “very bad man” President Assad of Syria, who continues to kill his people unabated, and unfettered by any misgivings of the west. The nice erstwhile ophthalmologist from Willesden had been seen as infinitely nicer than the father who slaughtered 10,000 of his people in a go. Syria’s continuing bloodshed will bubble up to the top of the page if Libya does begin to settle. But with less oil, and the UK and others suffering defence cuts, the eye specialist is likely to benefit from the west’s blind eye for a time yet.

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From the Office of Tony Blair, a rare and privileged communication received yesterday afternoon.

It promised that if I went to this website I would be treated to advance extracts from his book. Further, they would be published at 11.30pm last night. For me – perhaps for no one else – a broken promise.

When I went to bed at 11.46pm, no extracts. At 6.00am this morning, no extracts. All I could find were some rather eerie photographs of the former premier. I’m indebted to others for supplying me a few quotes from inside the tome.

“Maddening” Gordon made him drink more than he should have. So if there are no extracts on his website (for me at least), at least there are his somewhat gaunt features to prove that this at least may have been true. He was “right” to go to war. No apology for Iraq, but he writes that he will try to remedy the “consequences” until the end of his days. Buy the book and you too can contribute to his efforts.

All “maddening” Gordon seems to have done, in Blair’s book, is to have lost Labour a British general election. Even A Journey doesn’t blame him for Iraq. Although if Gordon had been a bit more “maddening” he might have done many tens of thousands who died, and millions who fled (and have still not returned), a great service.

For some reason, our former dear leader has not seen fit to grant Channel 4 News an interview. This is a loss. I always found him a rewarding interview. He was good at it. I never found the small talk easy - publicly relaxed and personable, he was privately awkward, almost, and unexpectedly gauche. But definitely seemed a nice man.

So how will history judge him? One of his confessions is that he regrets the fox hunting ban - it is close to an apology, not to the fox, but to the country.

“I didn’t understand the issue”, he is reported to have said. So that’s OK, he understood the war on Iraq – it was “right” – but not the attempt to prevent acts of cruelty against our four-footed foes.

Doubtless, A Journey (THE Journey was reportedly pulped as too much) will infect our debate tonight live on Channel 4 News with all five Labour leadership candidates.

The gaping sore that is 9/11 in the American psyche remains unhealed.

We who covered the co-ordinated attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington underestimated how deep, how searing, and how long lasting this event would prove to be.

Today this secular nation, whose refusal to either favour or move against any religion is enshrined in the constitution, is now at war with itself over whether a mosque and Islamic cultural centre should be built some two blocs away from Ground Zero.

Last week the Pew polling organisation in the United States revealed that the number of Americans who now believe Barack Obama to be a Muslim has risen from 11 per cent last year to 18 per cent today.

Add to all this, mass unemployment on a scale not seen in America since the 1930s and one is tempted to understand how this extraordinary entity that is America is seen by many to be talking itself into a double dip financial crisis.

To have been on the beach in America these past weeks, absorbing the New York Times and a lot of political back chatter, is to have seen elements of a society riven with a kind of collective nervous breakdown.

The end of the war in Iraq (is it really?); the disputed possibility of troop reductions in Afghanistan, emphasise how little the remedial military response to 9/11 has done to calm the nerves at home.

And yet when, last week, China finally overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy, to hear it in America, anyone would think the US would itself be thus overwhelmed. It took sage economists to point out that the US economy is still fourteen times that of China.

What America really seems to miss is what many have come round to praising Britain for – a coalition government. Many thought Obama might be it. Alas the limits of power and perhaps his own inexperience have rendered a period of some of the most partisan division in US modern political history.

Every time I met a politically connected or motivated American on the beach, the question was the same – coalition, how does it work, what does it take, and what does it say of Cameron and Clegg?

Well. Charismatic certainly, efficient effect, intelligent…and running for president? Well that’s how it felt to meet General Petraeus…

He had a good line on the World Cup: “rest Rooney for Saturday, save him for the other matches.” (England play USA on Saturday).

He was full of praise for UK Afghanistan effort - he set out the UK US linkages in military.

But he was cautious on the Israel question, one senses he is representative of US security institutional fatigue with the political failure of endless efforts to win Israeli Palestinian peace.

Headline from it all – without you the coalition cannot win in Afghanistan…

Petraeusism of the day: ‘The real surge in Iraq is a surge of ideas’.

All in all, no fire-crackers, but an intriguing close-up of a man who one suspects will attempt to go much further.

A short blog to start the day. I’m just off on the bike to chair an intriguing session for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Don’t often get the call from the military. But two very special guests today: Generals David Petraeus (US) and Peter Wall (UK) are to speak and interact with an audience.
Both have Iraq experience, both are now key players in the deployment of forces in Afghanistan.

But Petraeus is of particular interest in that as Obama’s key military mind he has thought deeply about US policy in the Middle East. He has raised questions about the balance of US interests and the way its relationship with Israel is handled. In the aftermath of the Gaza flotilla debacle he may have interesting things to say.

I shall blog later about what the generals have to say and the experience of sitting amid such military might.

Iraq is a country I have visited many times since I was first there to report from the front line of the harrowing Iran/iraq war in 1980. Foreign intervention and interference has dogged it for more than a century. No wonder Baghdad is seized with parties and celebration.

For the promised American pull-out from Iraq starts today. US forces start pulling out of urban areas in the country on what the Iraqi government has declared to be National Sovereignty Day.

This is not the end of the US-led occupation, merely the beginning of the end. 131,000 US forces remain and will do so until the cessation of combat operations in September 2010 and the eventual pull-out in 2011.

And the US and her allies leave amid an alarming upsurge of bomb attacks (200 dead in a week). Is it too fanciful to suggest that this horrifying adventure spells the last of such “wars of choice”?

Nonetheless, a military adventure which displaced some 4 million Iraqis, killed and wounded as many as a million (we shall never know the true figure), and reduced the country’s precious oil output to the point where, even today, it remains below that of Saddam’s final year in power, is coming to an end.

That adventure also shredded the reputation of Tony Blair at home and divided Europe as never before. This is before we even begin to estimate the financial costs of the war, which run into trillions of dollars.

So what were the Iraq war aims? To safeguard oil supplies? To remove Saddam? To instil a new democracy in the heart of the Middle East? To find and destroy weapons of mass destruction? To provide a bulwark against, and to reduce the power of, Iran?

Six new oilfield contracts are to be auctioned today, but production is still stagnant and the oil law is still stuck in the Iraqi parliament. Saddam has been replaced by an upsurge in radical religiously backed parties that threaten civil war at any turn.

Democracy has delivered a factional parliament and, in the prime minister, the firm hand that Iraq has grown used to. Water and power supplies remain inadequate. And Iran, despite recent events, is stronger than at any time since the Islamic revolution of 1979.

Perhaps Iraq enjoys a greater collective spirit of hope than at any recent time. But that hope has come expensively, and there is still a ways to go.

It is hard to imagine that history will smile on the two men, Bush and Blair, who decided to take the world in to this war – although it isn’t beyond the wit of Europe to reward one of them (who defied the majority of EU leaders on the war) with its presidency.

Gordon Brown will announce an inquiry into the Iraq war this week. My sources tell me that this will not be chaired by a judge, senior or retired. It will be chaired instead by a historian.

The hot tip in Whitehall is that it is likely to be the respected Churchill and Holocaust scholar Sir Martin Gilbert.

There are enormous risks to reputations – not least that of Tony Blair as he strives to become president of Europe (a real prospect). Securing that post for Mr Blair is said to be one of Lord Mandelson’s many responsibilities.

The government wants the build-up and political decisions that led Britain to war to be the focus of the inquiry. With judges such as former lord chief justice Lord Bingham having declared the war “a serious violation of international law and the rule of law”, there was never any expectation that the government would risk a judicial inquiry with the power of subpoena. And it may believe it has a safe pair of hands in Sir Martin Gilbert.

But Gilbert’s passion rests in contemporaneous documents. He will want the release of the mass of email traffic, the extraordinary secret service stuff that intersected with the dodgy dossier and the rest. He’s likely to insist on getting them. A historian can’t do much without the paperwork.

Critics argue that if the inquiry is chaired by a layman like Sir Martin Gilbert, then as with the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the make-up of the panel that sits with him will be critical. Many have felt that Macpherson would never have arrived at the concept of “institutional racism” in the police without the input of those who sat with him.

Another chapter in these “interesting times”.

I shan’t be around for the next couple of days. I’m going off to be kidnapped, bundled up in a sack, immersed in thick mud, and shot at. I’ll also be updating my first aid skills.

Once every three years in this business you have to go off and be “refreshed” on the hostile environment course. The insurance companies won’t insure you in Iraq and places if you haven’t been on it.

Methinks it’s a pleasurable break from the newsroom. But then the newsroom itself could be seen by some as a hostile environment – as we arm ourselves to go after the guys that wrecked the world’s banking system etc.

I’ll try to blog about it. But you wont’ be getting Snowmail from me until Thursday.