Imagine how different the national mood and discussion would be if the Christmas Day and Times Square bombers had succeeded rather than failed.

The country would be aflame with concern about terrorist attacks. The political recriminations toward the Obama administration would be intense. There would be a sense of urgency about reorganizing the federal government's approach to keeping the homeland safe.

There is nothing that the federal government did that caused these terrorist acts to fail rather than succeed. Yet there is a natural human tendency to react considerably differently to near-misses than actual tragedies even when the difference is luck or fate.

For the most part, I don't begrudge this. I don't want the country to be aflame with concern or there to be intense political recriminations toward the Obama administration.

There does, however, need to be a sense of urgency about reorganizing the federal government to better protect us.

The structure we currently have was bequeathed by the 9/11 Commission. Its recommendations became political holy writ. Even though the Bush administration thought some of them unwise, it felt politically compelled to go along.

Some of us wrote at the time that the 9/11 Commission's recommendations were stinkers, that they created a more cumbersome federal apparatus rather than the nimble, focused structure the threat required. Events have proved the criticisms valid.

Too much can be made of after-the-fact reconstructions. It will always be possible to see in retrospect how the proverbial dots could have been connected once you know how they are connected. In real time, each dot comes in to analysts with a blizzard of other dots and many of the other dots seem more important at the time.

Preventing the Christmas Day bomber from boarding a plane to the United States shouldn't have been that difficult, however. His father told the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria more than a month before the attempted bombing that he was concerned that his son had been radicalized and was headed to Yemen, a known hot spot of al-Qaida activity and training.

State Department officials made a half-hearted effort to determine whether the son had a U.S. visa. Due to a misspelling, they didn't find out that he did.

The son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was entered into a broad terrorist database of more than half a million names. He never made it to the no-fly list of about 4,000 names or the list of 14,000 people who are supposed to be subjected to close inspection if they attempt to board a plane bound for the U.S.

So, whose responsibility was it to follow-up on the warning from Abdulmutallab's father, discover that the son did have a visa, find out the other stuff about him the government knew, and keep him from having legal authorization to come to the United States? According to a White House review, that was a shared responsibility of the National Counterterrorism Center and the CIA. But neither of those agencies have authority to put someone on the no-fly list, which is maintained by the FBI.

A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee released last week said that five different federal agencies failed to do something important that would have kept Abdulmutallab from being able to enter the U.S. If protecting the homeland requires that many federal agencies to do that many things right, the odds of success exponentially diminish.

Last week, President Obama fired his director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair. President Bush's directors didn't last much longer. It's a makeshift position that's supposed to coordinate intelligence but has no authority over budgets, personnel or operations.

Thanks to the 9/11 Commission, responsibility for protecting the country against terrorist attack is scattered throughout the government. Intelligence is separated from operations. Every agency involved has lots of other things to do as well.

A terrorist attack on U.S. soil is a particular evil that not only can cause great damage but also shake the country's psyche and soul. The U.S. is obviously a continuing target. There should be a single federal agency with an exclusive focus on keeping that evil from happening.