COLUMN LEFT : British Cry for War at Fever Pitch : But voices of sanity are beginning to be heard.

It was Margaret Thatcher who first, at the start of the gulf crisis, urged George Bush toward the hang-tough path, and though she is no longer prime minister the Thatcher style in purblind braggadocio has easily survived her ouster. No country in the anti-Iraq alliance seems keener for war or more contemptuous of efforts to avoid it.

Day after day British newspapers echo with the thunder of experts predicting the course of battle: pitiless bombing at the onset of the allied offensive, followed by the great charge into Kuwait. Max Hastings, supreme editorial commander of the Telegraph newspapers, issued his combat directives in a long column Tuesday. .There should be “explosive means to generate violence,” he urged, adding sadly that “historically some British and American high commanders have been characterized by lack of ruthlessness, of the killer instinct on the battlefield.” Hastings said of the allied commanders that “If they allow their nerve to be shaken by severe casualties, if they accept checks and delays, the long-term costs to lives and strategy are likely to be far worse.”

Worse than not having a war at all? The Daily Mirror thinks so. In an editorial attacking the case for letting economic sanctions take their toll, the Mirror wrote this week, “Giving Saddam another breathing space would mean more deaths and terrible injuries among our forces.”

Indeed the idea of a peaceful settlement seems to cause profound alarm in many quarters of the British political Establishment. The Financial Times, under the headline “London fears Saddam will stage eleventh-hour initiative,” recently reported British fury over peace maneuvers by Germany and most particularly France. The story added worriedly that difference between President Bush and Congress “has raised parallel anxieties over the resilience of public opinion in the U.S.”

Such inference that America might lack the stomach for a good fight crops up frequently, along with sneers about the indiscipline of the U.S. press. One commentator, Sir Michael Howard, wrote last week in the London Times, “The American media, unable to distinguish between impartiality and irresponsibility, exploit every suggestion of poor morale among the American forces in the gulf.” In contrast to their American opposite numbers, British editors have accepted the prospect of severe censorship with scant demur.

The serious consequence of this war fever is that British Prime Minister John Major is under no constraint to be anything other than a cheerleader for U.S. policy. He has met with the emir of Kuwait, no doubt with national self-interest in mind, with whom, as one report put it--he “broached the possibility of British companies winning lucrative contracts for the reconstruction of Kuwait.” A new version of Lend Lease--”You bomb, we build.”

There are voices of sanity, many of them from military folk who have been in wars. Maj. Gen. Julian Thompson, who led a brigade of commandos during the Falklands war, warned that “prophets of air power have always been wrong,” that bombing won’t break the Iraqis and that there will be a bloody, costly slog on the ground. Others point out that the famous Security Council Resolution 678, permitting force after Jan. 15, is open to legal challenge in the World Court, since the U.N. Charter insists that force be used only when other means--i.e. economic sanctions--have been proved inadequate, which is by no means the case.

On this very issue of sanctions the British Labor Party leadership this week finally broke bipartisan ranks with the Conservative government. A former Labor cabinet minister, Denis Healey, urged continued economic sanctions rather than a war that would hasten a “world recession, crippling the hope of recovery in Eastern Europe, and plunging the Third World into catastrophe just as 15 million Africans are threatened with death by famine,” plus a possible global ecological disaster. Gerald Kaufman, Labor’s spokesman on foreign affairs, stated this week that “five months and 13 days (the period between the Iraqi invasion and Jan. 15) cannot convincingly be argued to be the maximum time” to let economic sanctions work.

A majority of Britons in fact favor efforts for peaceful resolution, and the strategy was articulated most succinctly by Sir Anthony Parsons, former British ambassador to the United Nations. He wrote that the problem comes down to linkage of an Iraqi withdrawal with a conference on Middle Eastern security addressing the Palestinian issue. The anti-Hussein coalition, Sir Anthony advised, has “to reconcile the inevitability of such a development with the need to avoid giving Saddam the credit for it.” Most of the British press may not like the idea, but solving this problem is preferable to the holocaust being so eagerly anticipated.