Once in a while, you have to take a deep breath and come to the realization that sometimes bad news is actually good news. It all depends on how you look at it. On Christmas Day, as we all know, there was a failed terrorist suicide bombing aboard a Northwest Airlines passenger jet inbound to Detroit from the Netherlands. The perpetrator, a Nigerian Islamic fundamentalist named Umar Farouk Abdulmullab smuggled liquid explosives aboard the flight. He detonated the bomb about twenty minutes out, but tough luck for him, only succeeded in igniting his boxer shorts. Ouch!

Now most of us will agree that the passengers and crew of that airliner had some terrific Christmas luck on their side when the detonation failed, but the “good news,” if we want to term it that way, goes far beyond that. This incident was a wake up call to the government and to all of us that we are still very much at war with a determined and evil enemy with whom there is no negotiation possible.

President Obama has tried to project a “kinder, gentler” foreign policy image of the United States than his predecessor. The Bush administration made no bones about it that the country was at war with an international Islamo-facist terrorist network and would do anything it had to protect the United States from further terrorist attacks. The policy may have been heavy handed. It may have hurt the sensibilities of some of our foreign friends, but it did work. There were no further attacks on his watch.

President Obama has chosen a more subtle approach that may be bearing fruit with more international cooperation, but at the same time it may have lulled the American people into thinking we are dealing with a criminal conspiracy rather than a war to the death with a fundamentalist Islamic movement rooted in the 12th century, but armed with modern technology. For instance, we are no longer engaged in a Global War of Terror, but rather the State and Defense Departments are enjoined to refer to our situation as “Overseas Contingency Operations.” As Mr. Abdulmutallab reminds us, folks we are at war. These people want to kill us, lots of us. Any where, any time, any how.

It is obvious to any but the most naïve among us that security measures have to be strengthened. The politically correct cadres of Cambridge, Brookline and the San Francisco Bay area caution that we must not “profile” Muslims of middle-eastern origin.

Indeed, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s boxer shorts hadn’t stopped smoldering before there were calls from the left not to “profile” because it made people feel uneasy and isolated. We’re sorry for their unease, but all security operations by their nature require de facto or de jure profiling. Your 70-year-old Irish grandmother is unlikely to be concealing a bomb, although she should receive primary screening too. Your twenty-something Pakistani college student may fit a more likely demographic and perhaps should be checked more carefully. In security you have to play the odds. The stakes are too high for everyone. The key is to treat everyone respectfully until given a reason not to.

Christmas was a wake up call from al-Qaeda “Yoo Hoo! We’re still here!” To steal a phrase from former Vice President Al Gore, the inconvenient truth is we are still very much at war. No venue is truly safe, and we have to remain vigilant. Watch out for exploding boxer shorts!