When Obama was elected and he appointed his national-security team, some conservatives hoped he would have no choice but to bend to reality and accept the responsibility that goes with defending the United States in a global war against religious fanatics. He’ll have no choice, we were told. He can’t allow an attack on the American homeland or he’ll be discredited. No president can ignore his obligation to protect Americans. Remember all that? Well, after nearly a full year, the Obama administration has not bent to reality and we have been attacked three times on American soil.

You might not recall the three attacks, in large part because the administration refuses to recognize jihadist terror attacks as jihadist terror attacks. But Sen. Joe Lieberman rightly reminded us on Fox New Sunday that “we really did go to war with the Islamist extremists who attacked us on 9/11” and that we have had more than a dozen attacks on our homeland — three of which penetrated security (the army-recruiter killed in Little Rock in May, Major Nadal Hassan’s Fort Hood massacre on November 5, and the Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab’s Christmas Day bombing mission). To be blunt: after seven and a half years without a single attack on American soil following 9/11, we have had three in a year during the Obama administration.

When then does the bending to reality occur? At what point is the light supposed to shine, that indeed it is madness to retreat to a pre-9/11 mentality, Mirandize terrorists, give them civilian trials, send Guantanamo detainees to Yemen, cease enhanced interrogation techniques and go after our own CIA operatives? The Fort Hood terror attack killed thirteen, but that seemed not to make any impression on the Obama team. The following week the civilian trial of KSM was announced, and the following month we learned of the decision to relocate Guantanamo detainees to Illinois. One wonders how high the casualty total must reach in one of these before the administration undertakes a full-scale re-examination of its anti-terror policies.

Let’s suppose that we had apprehended an associate of Abdulmutallab who had information about his plot. We would not have used any enhanced interrogation methods. He would have lawyered up, refused to talk, and the plot would have unfolded. And then, we would have seen the results of the whatever-Bush-did-we-do-the-opposite approach to national security. Imagine for a moment if the the bombing had been more “successful.” What would the public reaction then have been to Obama’s policy of willful indifference to reality?

At some point — and perhaps we have reached it — the American people will recognize that the Obami team is engaged in an entirely misguided and dangerous approach to the war on Islamic terror, starting with its refusal to recognize it as a war and to recognize that is is based on fundamentalist Islamic ideology. If Obama persists in allowing our national security to be formulated and executed by those who believe in hamstringing our own intelligence capabilities and engaging in dangerous PR stunts to improve our image among terrorists, he does so at tremendous political risk. But that is nothing compared to the risk to Americans’ safety and security.