“I have already had my fill of this bloody and unnecessary war,” Cook wrote in the mass-circulation newspaper the Sunday Mirror.

“I want our troops home and I want them home before more of them are killed,” Cook said. Twenty-three British soldiers have died so far in the 10-day old conflict.

But an ICM poll yesterday in the News of the World shows that 84 percent of Britons want the government to see the war through to a successful end. Only 11 percent wish to see British troops withdrawn from the front line. The government yesterday sharply criticized Cook for demanding that Britain withdraw its forces from Iraq.

“Parliament voted very clearly...to take this action,” Foreign Office Minister Mike O’Brien said on British Broadcasting Corp. television.

“Ten days after it started, I don’t think this is the time to start telling our troops that they have got to withdraw, leave Saddam Hussein in place and leave his butchery to continue in Iraq,” O’Brien said.

He said the government would “see the military campaign through until we achieve our objectives: That is, (Iraqi President) Saddam (Hussein) gone and Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction disarmed.”

O’Brien said, “I have enormous respect for Robin, but I just think this was the wrong time to say these sorts of things.”

Cook meanwhile accused the US-led coalition of laying siege to Baghdad — a move that he said would result in massive civilian suffering and many unnecessary deaths. “(US Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld has come up with a new tactic. Instead of going into Baghdad, we should sit down outside it until Saddam surrenders.

“There is no more brutal form of warfare than a siege. People go hungry. The water and power to provide the sinews of a city snap. Children die,” Cook wrote.

He also warned that the allies risked stoking up a “long-term legacy of hatred” for the West across the Arab and Muslim world because of the war.

Later yesterday, Cook appeared to change his stand. “I’m not in favor of abandoning the battlefield, and that is not my position. There can be no question at this stage of letting Saddam off the hook,” Cook said on BBC radio.

“I wasn’t in favor of starting this war, but having started this war it’s important to win it. The worst possible outcome would be one that left Saddam there.”

Cook resigned as Leader of the House of Commons on March 17, three days before Britain went to war alongside the United States.

Cook, foreign secretary between 1997 and 2001, stepped down because he could not accept responsibility for British involvement in Iraq without international backing.

Meanwhile, the bodies of 10 of the British servicemen who have so far died in the Iraq war were flown home on Saturday.

Eight of the returning dead British soldiers were killed when the US Sea Knight helicopter they were aboard crashed south of the Kuwaiti border on March 21.

The other two bodies were those of the crew of the British GR4 Tornado warplane which was hit near the Kuwaiti border by a US Patriot missile last Sunday.

According to official figures, 23 British soldiers have been killed in total since the start of the US-led war on March 20 — 14 in helicopter accidents, four in combat, and five as a result of “friendly fire.”

Britain sent about 45,000 British troops to the Gulf region.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has not indicated any plan to join the United States in sending more soldiers to Iraq.

However, Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said yesterday that British troops will be replaced if the war goes on for months.

The British troops “can certainly stay there for months...but clearly, ultimately, they would have to be replaced if that was such a long conflict,” Hoon said on BBC radio.