THE 9/11 COMMISSION’S final report came out at an opportune time in this election year. The panel’s findings — delivered in a bipartisan, unanimous report at a time when most debate is partisan and fractious — call on Americans and their leaders to re-focus attention on the real issue of 2004: Are we as a nation doing all we can to ensure our security, as future attacks surely are being readied?

The commission’s work plunged deeply into the causes and shortfalls of 9/11, of course. It provides the best documentation yet of the plotters’ entry into the United States and their preparations, and the lost opportunities to stop them. The findings include missed chances to break up the plot, which were quickly handicapped for red-state, blue-state America: those on President Clinton’s watch and those on President Bush’s. It’s telling that these are reported this way, rather than simply as missed opportunities for the United States. We have to get beyond the blame game, and the panel’s report provides us that opportunity.

One major change the commission seeks, creating a Cabinet-level czar and staff to oversee all intelligence efforts, also faces partisanship and turf wars. The military branches have their own huge information-gathering agencies and covert operatives, a role that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has pushed to increase. The FBI and electronic specialists at the National Security Agency operate separately from the CIA. Changing this arrangement would challenge entrenched positions — as would the call to streamline congressional oversight.

For the record, the CIA chief is supposed to be the singular head of U.S. intelligence: The post’s title is Director of Central Intelligence. In practice, that has not been the case for decades; he has served as one agency head. As this report’s findings are considered, making the CIA chief the true chief of U.S. intelligence should be considered strongly before a new apparatus is built to put a czar over that post and others.

That proposal and others in this report deserve such a serious debate, but the recent level of U.S. discourse discourages that hope. The war on Iraq has further divided an already-split electorate, but the 9/11 Commission’s report is a bracing reminder of the recent past. Less than three years ago, national divisions were set aside in a surge of grief, anger and resolve. While times have changed, the fundamental situation remains: We are at war with a network of reactionary killers who see all of America — red states and blue — as a target.

That unity will not return just by wishing, but the commission’s ideas ought to be debated in that spirit, even in an election year. Especially in an election year; because elections are supposed to influence the nation’s direction and provide a forum for debate of the big issues. And there’s no bigger issue than this.

But any civil discussion is endangered when millions of dollars of attack ads, and millions of partisans, are ready to go at it in the public arena. The only effective restraint on these forces is for their own allies to insist on civility, and a focus on future readiness, instead of past blame. For this commission’s important findings to get the hearing they deserve, citizens will have to insist that candidates set aside the red-meat rhetoric cooked up to feed the political base, and answer the question: “What’s your plan to better protect America?”