Washington ? President Bush played the summer as prelude in minor key. He let others dominate the vacation season’s often erratic discussion of his vow to remove Iraq’s noxious dictator and to destroy the country’s weapons of mass destruction. But this week, Bush is back: His voice, style and substance now command the possibilities of success or failure in the Iraq undertaking.

Bush’s re-entry into the debate, in speeches at home and the United Nations, was designed to underscore his full-steam-ahead determination to take on the political, diplomatic and military challenges of a strike on Iraq quickly and in that order.

He is likely to press Congress for a resolution of support before the House and Senate recess for electioneering next month. Bush then plans to go to the U.N. Security Council to ask the world organization to live up to its obligations to oversee the disarmament of Iraq. Preliminary work on the wording of a U.S. draft resolution began this week.

The emerging Bush fall offensive is a mixture of high strategy and low politics. It is designed to deal with a long-standing Iraqi threat that has become more urgent since Sept. 11, 2001 while putting Democrats on the patriotic hot seat in a close and vital election.

Nations get the leaders they deserve, it is said, and it may even be true. What is certain is that nations rise and fall on the choices and personalities of those leaders. Substitute others for George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein and the world would be at a different historical junction today.

Nearly 20 months into his presidency, Bush has demonstrated an ability to tolerate evolving (i.e., messy) strategies and situations filled with inconsistencies that would unsettle more conventionally minded politicians. He does not resolve big strategic debates so much as push them forward to see what happens next.

Perhaps this comfort zone for dichotomy should not be surprising in a man who has spent his life between West Texas and Kennebunkport, Maine, who saw his father evicted from both historic heights of popularity and the White House, and who talks candidly about chasing the low life while he was at two of America’s most exalted institutions of higher learning.

As president, Bush takes Colin Powell’s suggestions about the form of what he should say on the Middle East while hewing closely to the substance offered to him by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. It does not seem to enter Bush’s mind to order his subordinates to shut up and walk single file behind him. Bush practices a form of coalition-building at home that inevitably creates confusion and unease abroad.

The administration may well follow a mix-and-match approach in seeking a Security Council enforcement resolution on Iraq (a formal step sought by Powell) that will set the bar on inspections so high that Saddam Hussein will have to reject it outright (a la Cheney and Rumsfeld).

Bush also will try to accommodate key allies on matters of form without letting his hands be tied on substance. At his Camp David meeting with Bush last weekend, Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair won some input rights on the shaping of a U.S. draft resolution while work proceeds on a British draft as well.

The White House’s top command is said to feel that Bush lost nothing by ceding the airwaves and op-ed pages of August to those who question the wisdom or morality of a U.S. attack on Iraq, since he and Cheney can quickly take over and redirect the debate. That is probably right. National security is a leadership issue. The public follows a president’s lead as long as it has confidence in him personally.

Bush is an unconventional leader whose world view was not formed in the Cold War. He came to the White House without a popular-vote majority and with controversy surrounding his competence and intelligence, and then saw Republicans lose control of the Senate. His back-and-forth approach toward his national security team scares the wits out of many members of the foreign policy establishment, Republican and Democrat alike.

All this scares me some, too, to tell the truth. But you have to admire this president’s instincts for doing the right thing on Iraq the world’s most dangerous dictator must finally go and the audacity of his willingness not to duck this and other hard issues.

He deserves an attentive and open-minded hearing from the nation, and from the world, for the case he has now begun to make.

Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.