For President Bush, suddenly every option in Iraq looks bad.

To simply stay the course locks him onto a trajectory that virtually guarantees steady U.S. casualties and rising violence against international and Iraqi targets.

Bolstering the force in Iraq with more American troops could increase security — but provide ammunition to critics who accused the administration of underestimating from the outset the requirements of reconstructing the country, while compounding the strain on a U.S. military already stretched thin by commitments around the world.

Providing the United Nations a larger role in the reconstruction would generate more troops at less cost — but give the Democrats running for Bush’s job in 2004 a huge opening to argue that the administration was wrong all along to assume it could invade and rebuild Iraq without broad international support.

For Bush, none of these options can look very attractive. The real question may be which is the least worst option. His choice will reveal much about his style of leadership.

As president, Bush has been far less flexible than he was as governor of Texas. At times in Washington, when faced with incontrovertible evidence he was barreling into a dead end, he’s been willing to shift direction; Bush displayed that instinct in dropping his resistance to a Department of Homeland Security.

More often, he has dug in his heels even when circumstances seemingly demanded a change. He has continued to push through massive tax cuts initially designed as a response to government surpluses even after the surpluses melted into record deficits. He has displayed an equally stubborn streak in repeatedly nominating aggressively ideological judges he knows are virtually certain to provoke filibusters from Senate Democrats. Far more than in Texas, Bush in Washington equates resolve with rigidity.

From that overall pattern, the easiest course for Bush in Iraq would be to stay the course, or to make only cosmetic changes. This has been his initial instinct.

Standing pat in Iraq might expose Bush to the least short-term political pain, because it doesn’t require him to implicitly acknowledge any earlier miscalculation. He can continue to accentuate the positive and hope the violence doesn’t reach a critical mass that undermines public support in America for the mission.

But staying the course may be his most dangerous long-term strategy. Polls show Americans still committed to the goal of reconstructing Iraq, but uneasy about the progress toward that goal. And even among those who supported the war, such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., demands are growing for Bush to try to stabilize Iraq by providing more troops.

James Dobbins, director of the Center for International Security and Defense Policy at the Rand Corp., says the history of previous occupations shows that increasing the number of troops in Iraq would reduce the number of casualties. Dobbins, who served as a special envoy for Bush in Afghanistan and helped manage the reconstruction of Bosnia and Kosovo for President Clinton, says based on those experiences he believes it will require from 300,000 to 500,000 troops to effectively secure Iraq.

If Dobbins is right that Bush needs thousands more troops to stop the bleeding in Iraq, the president has only two real options: deploying more U.S. forces or persuading other nations to send troops.

Significantly enlarging the American presence seems a nonstarter. It would dramatically increase the cost to U.S. taxpayers. The larger problem is that, with commitments in the Balkans and tensions in North Korea, the Army simply doesn’t have enough bodies to double its deployment in Iraq. Dobbins says the only way the administration could free more troops for Iraq is to increase the overall size of the American military, an idea that Bush’s political advisers could hardly relish on the eve of the presidential race.

Which means the only plausible way to bolster the force in Iraq is to reach a power-sharing agreement at the United Nations that provides cover for countries such as Russia, France, Germany, India, Pakistan and Turkey to commit troops.

This wouldn’t be easy for Bush, either. His foreign policy has been based on freeing the United States from multilateral constraints; his guiding assumption has been that if America leads forcefully enough, others will follow. To cede any meaningful control to the United Nations now would allow Bush’s critics to argue that his approach was misguided.

But while a turn to the United Nations might encourage such accusations in the near-term, it would defang them in the long run. If Iraq next summer is redeveloping more peacefully under the watch of an international security force, charges by Democrats that they would have recruited allies earlier are unlikely to carry much sting.

Sometimes the leverage in a tug of war belongs to the side that lets go of the rope. That may be the reality facing Bush in his tug of war with allies abroad, and Democrats at home, over sharing the daunting responsibility for rebuilding Iraq.