On his first full day back in the White House last week after vacation, President Barack Obama chastised top officials over discoveries of growing airline security lapses in the wake of the attempted Christmas Day bombing aboard an international flight to Detroit.

“We dodged a bullet but just barely,” he said, according to witnesses at the meeting. “It was averted by brave individuals, not because the system worked, and that is not acceptable.”

Obama then pronounced that “our intelligence community failed to connect those dots.”

We respectfully submit to President Obama that his own pronouncement is unacceptable.

With each new day, there appears to be new evidence of a porous, barely functioning security and intelligence system in place that has averted disaster because of dumb luck and brave, fast-acting citizens.

This all unfolded against an ill-spoken statement two days after the failed bombing by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that “the system worked.”

While Napolitano reversed herself in the following days, that simple statement points to the heart of the problem: the Obama administration seems to think that our security and intelligence systems are working.

It clearly is not.

Granted, on Thursday Obama stepped forward and took some blame for the incident, saying “the buck stops with me,” (a play on President Harry S. Truman’s famous phrase). He ordered stricter measures for improving aviation security and enhancing U.S. intelligence.

But this came days after he’d said he would not condone “finger-pointing.”

We think finger-pointing is most appropriate. And it needs to be pointed at him.

When it comes to our national security, we must scrutinize its effectiveness.

Mounting evidence after the foiled bombing, suggest deliberate plans were set to attack our country and reveal intelligence and security failures along the way.

This has us conclude our current system is not effective and must be fixed.

We must begin with the ouster of Homeland Secretary Napolitano. who seems to believe differently.

Until she is replaced with a new set of eyes, and Obama’s folks admit our defense systems are broken or are severely compromised, we won’t be safe.

We must also reconsider the wisdom of retaining Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair.

It was under his leadership that these intelligence dots were not connected.

The unfortunate component of the U.S. intelligence community’s failures is the attempt to fix lapses at the front end by stepping up measures at the back end.

So instead of understanding and acting on what intelligence is telling us, we are engaged in a national debate over how strict — and invasive — airport security should be.

Had the United States followed Great Britain’s example and denied the visa of Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in the first place, airport security would not be the focal point of this debate.

The theory behind the creation of the mega-agency Department of Homeland Security was precisely to avoid such failures in connecting the dots.

To focus exclusively on airport security when our intelligence apparatus performed so dismally is like blaming the police for allowing your unlocked house to be burglarized.

Whether because of xenophobia or arrogance, eight years after a major attack on American soil by foreign terrorists, we still do not seem to know our enemy or their capabilities.

Until we do, even if every airline passenger were subjected to full body-cavity searches, we would still not be safe.