AS NATO unleashed its bombs and missiles on Serb targets and the Balkan tinderbox threatens a wider war in Europe, Western nerve was already being tested over not only where this action may lead to, but also over the right of the allies to take it.

It is a question that splits between the rightness of the deed and its legitimacy.

For while it is true that NATO does not have specific authorisation from the United Nations Security Council - and as angry Russia accuses the alliance of "illegal military action," UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says the Security Council should have been involved in any decision on the use of force - it does not follow that it needs an explicit UN mandate to do what is right, even though it would be preferable to have one.

This is even so when, as is the case, war is waged against a sovereign state, not out of self-defence, but in the form of a punitive police action.

And if anyone should read international law, it is Russia's ambassador to the UN who accuses NATO of its violation.

If he did, he would soon discover that Serbia's brutal dictator Slobodan Milosevic had trampled all over the laws of war as enshrined in the internationally-upheld Geneva conventions.

For he is up to his knees in the blood of atrocity in Kosovo against whose majority ethnic Albanian population he has waged repression, terror and even genocide. Time and again, he was warned by NATO to stop.

His repeated refusal left the allies no option but to carry out their threats of force.

They were right to use them on both moral and humanitarian grounds and on legal ones also.

And while this action may lack the Security Council's stamp of approval - and Milosevic could have carried on killing in Kosovo for as long as he liked had NATO to wait for Russia and China to join in giving their approval at the UN for the use of force - it is upheld by the UN resolution of last October which demanded a ceasefire in Kosovo and set limits on Serbia's military strength there, all of which have been blatantly flouted.

It should also be borne in mind that when NATO took the initiative over Bosnia in 1995, over which the UN havered for months while so much blood flowed, Serbia was brought to heel and the negotiating table to reach the political settlement there which the allies still police.

The doubts over the lawfulness of the action over Kosovo are a red herring and are defeated in any case by the indisputable moral legitimacy of what NATO is doing - trying to put an end to evil.

The only real and valid qualms are the political and practical ones of this war over whether its aim will succeed with air power alone, or whether the West will be dragged into a bloody conflict on the ground that drags on and on like a Vietnam in Europe, and, worse, whether it escalates beyond the Balkans.

But even with these fears raised, the real international crime would have been to have stood by and done nothing over the killings in Kosovo.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.