Garret FitzGerald: It had seemed at one point that Tony Blair's position as Prime Minister might have come under threat as a result of his decision to join in the Iraq war without authorisation by a further Security Council resolution.
However, despite losing the support of half of his backbenchers as well as that of his Leader of the House, he has not merely survived but, it seems to me, has actually regained some political ground.
The evident conviction with which he spoke, and his command of the House throughout his address, worked strongly in his favour.
As a speaker there is a clear contrast between President Bush and himself.
It is difficult for us in Europe to take Bush seriously because of his particular way of speaking. It is absolutely clear that Tony Blair believes that it is right for Britain to support the US in this war - and not just because it suits Britain's interests to stay close to the US.
He genuinely believes, on the basis of what seem mainly to be US intelligence reports, that Iraq retains a capacity in biological and chemical weapons.
It does seem that such material existed at the time when the earlier set of inspections took place in the late 1990s, and there must certainly be doubts as to whether Saddam Hussein would have chosen to destroy these chemical and biological materials voluntarily after those inspectors had left. It is a fact that over many months he failed to produce to the inspectors evidence of having done so. Nevertheless it is interesting that Robin Cook, who presumably must have had access to intelligence reports when he was foreign secretary up to the middle of last year, believes that whatever material may still exist is not capable of being used in weapons.
This biological or chemical material might, however, be usable by terrorists who were prepared to release such material in a western city - if such terrorists were given access it by Saddam. And Tony Blair and Robin Cook may simply have different appreciations of the likelihood of that happening.
American impatience with restraints on US freedom of action seems to have been a major factor influencing the decision to abandon diplomacy last weekend.
On the face of it the difference between the US and Britain and other Security Council members seemed to be coming down to a matter of ten days or so. For at the end, until headed off by an angry US, Chile, with support from other middle-ground Security Council members, was proposing a deadline of 21 days, as against the 10 days or so that the US accepted.
It is true that it was not clear whether the veto-wielding opponents of the US were prepared to agree to armed action being taken if the inspectors did not report complete Iraqi compliance at the end of that period, but if Chile had not been warned off and if more time had been given, that issue could have been clarified.
If France rather than the US and Britain had been faced with such a proposal and had refused to accept the need for armed action at the end of some such period, that would at the very least have strengthened the decision to go ahead.
An agreement along the lines of the Chilean proposal would have suited Tony Blair much better, but by last weekend his capacity to control the pace of events had been exhausted.
Much though he might have wanted do so, he couldn't persuade an obviously hugely impatient Bush to hold off any longer.
A very negative factor in all this has been the depth of ill-feeling that has developed between the US and Britain on the one hand and France on the other.
Neither Germany nor Russia have attracted anything like as much hostility as France has done in this affair. In part this reflects a long-established antipathy towards France on the part of both Britain and the US, but President Chirac, basking in the glow of French chauvinism and chuffed by the popularity of his stance with French people of every class, did nothing to soften the situation.
His rejection of a late British proposal, before he had even seen the detail of what was involved, gave his cross-channel opponents an opportunity to present him in a most negative light, and a French attempt to retrieve this blunder at a lower level by a hasty diplomatic qualification of his initial statement had no impact.
The venomous language used both in the US and Britain about France, (French people in Washington are having to pretend to be French Canadians on order to eat in peace in restaurants), is childish. And reports from Brussels on the meeting of EU heads of government there on Thursday night do not suggest that Tony Blair yet recognises the dangers to Britain and Europe of this divisiveness.
None of this bodes well either for the future of the UN, of NATO or of the European Union - nor can the European Convention in Brussels work successfully in these tense conditions. It may take quite a long time to get the Anglo-French relationship back on to an even keel. If the war proves to be a short and not too bloody one, and if it does not spill over into other parts of the Middle East, we may soon be facing the issue of how to restore the economy of Iraq, hit by the impact of war and debilitated by the way Saddam Hussein has handled sanctions. There may well be some reluctance by countries opposed to this war to pay for whatever damage is done by the US and Britain.
At the same time on the American side there may be an unwillingness to allow the UN to take control of the transition to a federal democratic regime there - something that, together with interim UN control of Iraq's oil resources, Tony Blair has been proposing. The US has been talking, however, about installing an American military government in Iraq for an unspecified period.
If such a regime were to be temporary, pending an early handover to the UN, that would be acceptable, but any US attempt to hold on to control any longer than absolutely necessary could land the occupying forces, British as well as American, into a lot of trouble.
Even Iraqis glad to see the back of Saddam would become restless about a period of US military rule. However unenthused the US administration may currently be about the UN, it could be very much in its interest for that organisation to play the principal role in Iraq's transition to democracy.
This would help to dispel the suspicion that the war has really been about a US desire to control Iraq's oil, initially through an American military regime, pending the installation of a puppet US-controlled government.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie