In these early, crucial days of the conflict in the Balkans, traditional political alliances of post-Cold War Britain are becoming increasingly blurred. That much was evident from the realignment of key figures on the left and the right in the House of Commons. Traditional adversaries joined forces against Britain's involvement in NATO bombings of Serbia while backbench Conservatives, usually unequivocal in their support once British troops go into action, questioned the legality of the conflict, even though the party line backed the bombings.
Their misgivings, although confined to a group of fewer than 20 Labour and Tory MPs, nevertheless buck the trend of the latest opinion polls. Not surprisingly, once British men and women of the armed forces go into battle, public support traditionally increases. But as the majority of MPs on the Labour back benches support the government, it has been the old left MPs, Tony Benn and his usual opponent, Lord Healey, who have defied the government's justification of the war on humanitarian grounds.
After the Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, opened a six-hour emergency debate on Kosovo last Thursday, telling MPs that not to have acted "when we knew the atrocities that were being committed would have been to make ourselves complicit in their repression", Mr Benn spluttered: "Could anyone with their knowledge of history list any war for humanitarian purposes?"
The anti-war campaigner had found an odd bedfellow, not just in Lord Healey, but also in the former US secretary of state, Dr Henry Kissinger, quoting him as an opponent of using US military power in determining the outcome of ethnic conflict.
If the pacifists on the left never imagined for a moment that they would find themselves in agreement with Dr Kissinger as they asserted the legitimacy of the United Nations over NATO and condemned its actions in a sovereign state, then the position taken up by the Labour MP, Mr Ken Livingstone, must also have come as a surprise to them.
As Mr Benn and Lord Healey took their cue from Serbia's fight against the Nazis in the second World War, Mr Livingstone compared President Milosevic's treatment of ethnic Albanians to Hitler's exploitation of the Jews. His support for NATO bombings is based on President Milosevic's rise to power by "exploiting the fear of Muslims".
If the bombings fail, then NATO should consider sending in ground troops: "I believe this is a man who had used the worst evil possible to rise to power, to divide his people, to trade on fear and operate a regime of systematic mass rape and murder and genocide."
It emerged during the debate that 12 Labour MPs were preparing to vote against the government, but were prevented from doing so because of a Commons technicality. The Tories also have their nay-sayers, notably the shadow Trade and Industry Secretary, Mr John Redwood, and Baroness Thatcher's former Defence Minister, Mr Alan Clark. And in the Lords, the former NATO Secretary-General, Lord Carrington, has said he has the "gravest misgivings" about the air strikes. The signs from the Tory back-benches, closely monitored by the government, are, in the words of Mr Clark in yesterday's Observer, that the "abstract concept" of protecting human rights will quickly fade if the conflict spreads beyond Yugoslavia.
To that end the Tory leader, Mr William Hague, acknowledged those doubts in his address to the nation on Saturday when he said politicians owed it to British servicemen and women to provide them with a "clear sense of direction, a clear goal".
The fear that NATO lacks a clear objective has meant that although the Tory leadership backs the bombings, its foundation is a reassurance that the armed forces will not be committed to an open-ended ground war.