IRAN-CONTRA HEARINGS: FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT; North's View Is That of a Band of Patriots Opposed by a Hostile and Unreliable World

To the White House that Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North has pictured this week, the world was an arena of unrelenting ideological struggle. The White House itself, mesmerized by the struggle, was a place where major questions went unasked and where much of the rest of official Washington was dismissed as thoroughly untrustworthy.

Colonel North has portrayed himself as a key member of a little band of patriots - a band that included pilots on clandestine missions, the Director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey, and a few private citizens - that despite immense obstacles managed to keep alive the Nicaraguan insurgency. They did so, he testified, despite a bureaucracy that resisted their efforts, an executive branch that was full of critics of their tactics and a Congress that balked. No Regrets

During his two days of Congressional testimony, Colonel North has expressed not the slightest regret at his role in overriding all opposition. The Marine officer conceded that he and other key staff members at the White House had systematically lied to committees of Congress that were trying to discover what was going on; that made him ''uncomfortable,'' he said, but he did it again and again.

At one point, Colonel North said that without ''a handful'' of brave people, working under his general direction, who kept American aid flowing to the rebels in Nicaragua, those contras would have disappeared during the period when Congress had banned direct or indirect military aid - when, as the colonel said, ''the Congress didn't care.''

A moment later, he apologized to the minority of Senators and Representatives who backed contra aid, but not to the majority who opposed it at the time and, it appears, still do.

The entire burden of his testimony was that he and his ''superiors'' -whom he assumed at the time to include President Reagan - felt that American national security was at stake in the Nicaraguan operations, and that they were the sole competent judges as to what would best promote that security. In the interest of furthering their policy, he suggested, it was legitimate to lie to Congress and to the public.