The surprisingly readable report released by the 9/11 Commission on Thursday paints a chilling picture of the terrorist attacks on the United States but is a far less reliable blueprint for fixing the national security lapses that failed to prevent the attacks.

The commission's suggestions on what to do are mostly unobjectionable. Who could disagree with proposals to "identify and prioritize actual or potential terrorist sanctuaries," to "communicate and defend American ideals in the Islamic world" and to "target terrorist travel"?

The more controversial part of the report's conclusions deals with how to achieve the reforms that need to be accomplished. Essentially, the report calls for "unity of effort" in combating terrorism by engaging in wide-ranging structural reforms of the nation's security apparatus. The main proposal is to create a new security czar. The plan is meeting resistance among Bush administration officials.

The problems that allowed 9/11 to take place are systemic and are unlikely to be fixed by adding additional layers of bureaucracy and shuffling a few chairs among intelligence agencies.

"The most important failure was one of imagination," intoned the report. "We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat." Although it's hard for anyone to have grasped the magnitude of potential attacks pre-9/11, intelligence agencies are designed to assess such threats, and there were important clues, including the attacks on the USS Cole in Yemen and the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The report details many basic intelligence failures by U.S. officials.

Clearly, the officials lacked imagination. But, as the report explains, "Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies." That is perhaps the most telling sentence in the entire 567-page report. Even leaders of bureaucracies are unable to make substantive changes in the Byzantine systems of red tape that develop over decades. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking there is some magical fix to America's security problem. How can increasing government bureaucracy fix a problem caused by too much government bureaucracy?

As U.S. Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Newport Beach, points out in a column on the first page of this section, "The intelligence community employs enough people to populate a midsize U.S. city. It includes 15 separate agencies, each with unique and complex capabilities and missions critical to our security." Mr. Cox and others rightly note that the commission's key proposal - creating a national security czar - will only exacerbate the problem.

Commission members stayed out of presidential politics by steering clear of blaming the Bush or Clinton administrations in particular for their failures. But relatives of 9/11 victims wonder why no one has been punished for enormous security failures. That reaffirms one of the problems with bureaucracies: No one is held accountable, even for egregious failures and mistakes.

Congress is going on recess, and the presidential campaign is heating up, so the proposals probably won't be addressed until 2005. Commission members are pushing hard for quick adoption of their proposals. "If something bad happens while these recommendations are sitting there, the American people will quickly fix political responsibility for the failure," said former Illinois governor and commission member Jim Thompson, a Republican.

But rather than be frightened into quickly adopting complex proposals that probably don't touch the heart of the problem, Congress needs to go slow and think carefully about our security needs. The real problem is bureaucracy, and the assumption that any level of bureaucracy can adequately protect an entire nation.