Commons analysis: Who would celebrate and who would weep if British troops were pulled back now? With those words Tony Blair yesterday threw down the gauntlet to his Labour tormentors in the House of Commons.
Barely 15 hours before the House had listened rapt to Robin Cook's personal statement explaining his resignation from the government in opposition to a war with Iraq commanding neither international agreement nor domestic support.
And MPs woke yesterday morning to hear the former leader of the Commons insist that the decisive parliamentary vote - in which he urged his colleagues to halt the commitment of British forces - was not "a vote of confidence in Tony Blair".
The Prime Minister saw it differently. Time and again it had been said and written that his authority was "on the line" over Iraq and his partnership with a right-wing Republican President of the United States viscerally disliked and distrusted by many in the British Labour Party. Mr Blair arrived in the Commons plainly content to leave it there.
"To retreat now, I believe, would put at hazard all that we hold dearest, turn the United Nations back into a talking shop, stifle the first steps of progress in the Middle East; leave the Iraqi people to the mercy of events which we would have relinquished all power to influence for the better," he told the packed and expectant chamber.
"Tell our allies that at the very moment of action, at the very moment when they need our determination, Britain faltered. I will not be party to such a course."
Mr Blair's meaning could not have been clearer. Contrary to Mr Cook's assertion, MPs were being asked for their verdict on his leadership. With a third of the British army standing ready for conflict in the Gulf, it could hardly have been otherwise.
Nor did Mr Blair need to spell out the ignominy that would await him following the retreat advocated by Mr Cook, or, more important, the ridicule and humiliation which would descend upon the United Kingdom.
On Monday night Mr Cook solemnly told MPs he would give no succour to those on the left sensing in the Iraq crisis an opportunity to topple Mr Blair. In reality Mr Cook had used his famed forensic skills to dissect Mr Blair's entire case for action now against Saddam Hussein.
In the process the one-time foreign secretary also encapsulated much continuing Labour angst over the outcome of the last American presidential election: "What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops to action in Iraq."
Having commended Mr Blair's heroic efforts to secure a second Security Council resolution, Mr Cook could not now pretend that getting one was of no importance. International isolation and division in the Security Council and European Union were "heavy casualties" in a war not yet begun.
Military strategy could not be based on assurances that Saddam was weak - his forces so demoralised that war might be over in days - and at the same time justify pre-emption on the claim that he was a serious threat.
Which brought Mr Cook to his most explosive charge, namely that Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of that term - namely, a credible device capable of being delivered against strategic city targets.
Here was a former foreign secretary, who by implication had been privy to the intelligence data, questioning Mr Blair's given reason for military action.
Whatever his personal protestations, Mr Cook had seized the leadership of Labour's anti-war party. And by yesterday - courtesy of an instantly diminished Clare Short's almost unbelievable U-turn - the former leader of the Commons had set himself up instead as its conscience.
Without doubting that principle formed a powerful part of the mix which led Mr Cook to resignation, obvious questions presented themselves.
If he did not believe Saddam a real and present threat to his region, Britain or the wider world, why on earth had he backed Mr Blair in seeking UN authority for war in the first place? And why would such a war have been more justified because it carried the approval of Presidents Chirac and Putin?
If Mr Blair was asking himself as much he chose not to personalise the debate. His Commons strategy was to ignore the man and deal with the issues.
He said it was "palpably absurd"to suggest Saddam had voluntarily destroyed the weapons unaccounted for when the weapons inspectors left Baghdad in 1998 in the intervening years.
On March 7th the inspectors published a 173-page document listing 29 different areas where they had been unable to obtain information. On that basis alone Iraq was in material breach of Resolution 1441, prompting proposals for further compromise around a second resolution setting a final ultimatum through a diplomatic process only finally halted by the French threat to veto in all circumstances.
Mr Blair's conclusion was clear: "The greater danger to the UN is inaction: to pass Resolution 1441 and then refuse to enforce it would do the most deadly damage to the UN's future strength, confirming it as an instrument of diplomacy but not of action."
And the message, should the Commons follow Mr Cook and determine otherwise? "What will Saddam feel? Strengthened beyond measure. What will the other states who tyrannise their people, the terrorists who threaten our existence, what will they take from that? That the will confronting them is decaying and feeble."
Mr Blair would have none of it. This was the time for the Commons to give a lead, "to show that we will stand up for what we know to be right."