Washington is abuzz about the release of an official White House report detailing the failure of America's security agencies to stop the Nigerian underwear bomber from nearly blowing up a jetliner over US soil.

The analysts, pundits, prognosticators and administration apologists are wearing their outrage on their sleeves, lobbing political grenades, announcing policy changes and throwing out plenty of Monday morning quarterbacking over who didn't share what information with which agency or official.

Ignore them all and don't bother reading the report.

All the after-action testimony, recommendations and takeaways resulting from the attempted Christmas Day bombing by Nigerian jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab will not get us one inch closer to preventing these kinds of attacks on our countrymen in the future. Everyone is conspicuously ignoring the simple fact that the only way to prevent such a plan from ever evolving into action is to detain or kill the people plotting it before they even get to the airport. But no one's talking about any of that, and you surely won't see it in any official mea culpa.

In earlier remarks on the incident, President Obama spoke only one sentence about going on the offensive.

"As these violent extremists pursue new havens, we intend to target al Qaeda wherever they take root, forging new partnerships to deny them sanctuary, as we are doing currently with the government in Yemen." 

But we're mostly told about measures that include Superman x-ray-vision machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, no blankets on your lap during final approach, profiling and "accountability" at the top of our vast and growing domestic security bureaucracy -- more reflexively defensive measures that will ultimately do nothing to end the jihadist threat. Has there been a single terrorist stopped by TSA before boarding an international flight using the "tools" developed by Homeland Security to thwart potential attackers?

Who cares whether the State Department passed on a warning to its embassies, or if the CIA compiled the right dossier on the Nigerian rich boy, or if NSA intercepted a coded launch order or if the Counterterrorism Center coalesced it all in its Hollywood-style 'bat cave?' It should have never even gotten that far - and we should be hearing conversations about how it will never get that far again instead of "enhanced screening technologies," "watchlisting procedures" and "interagency policy processes."

The reaction is reminiscent of the headlong rush to field Mine-resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, to Iraq in 2006 and 2007. The massive vehicles with their angled hulls and thick armor were nearly invulnerable to all but the most powerful improvised explosive device attacks launched by an ever-more sophisticated Iraqi insurgency. MRAPs proved extremely effective in protecting the troops inside, reducing casualties during a time when debate raged over whether America should continue its war in Iraq to win, or cut its losses and leave.

But what the MRAP did not do was prevent an IED from exploding. The MRAP did not kill one single IED emplacer, nor did it destroy a single IED-making plant, fabricator or planner. Instead, what eventually stopped the IEDs from going off was killing and capturing the people financing, sheltering, building and putting the IEDs into the ground and drying up support for those who might follow. It was an aggressive offensive strategy that stopped the IEDs, not hunkering down inside a bank vault on wheels - snipers, not cold-rolled steel, proved the decisive factor.

Same goes with the strategy to defeat the underwear bomber and his Yemeni henchmen. We never hear anyone in this administration say: "We can prevent this kind of attack by stopping the would-be bomber before he even leaves his safe house." Perhaps its GWOT fatigue, a wariness of being distracted from domestic policy agendas or a deep philosophical skepticism that jihadism against Americans is really an act of war that prevents the Obama White House from confronting terrorist attacks head-on.

In the end, it's not about why you confront such attacks - or even why the attackers launch them. It's about how you prevent and defeat them.

President Obama said in his Jan. 7 remarks after the release of the White House report on the Christmas Day attack that "of course, there is no fool proof solution" to preventing such an attack. Well, actually, there is. Leave a smoking hole from a Reaper drone where the next Abdulmutallab sets foot instead of relying on some overworked TSA screener to interpret what's in someone's underwear at an airport security stop.