Rather, he is a midlevel religious functionary who happens to have American citizenship and speak English. This makes him a propaganda threat, but not one whose elimination would do anything to limit the reach of the Qaeda branch.

He’s not even particularly good at what he does: Mr. Awlaki is a decidedly unoriginal thinker in Arabic and isn’t that well known in Yemen. His most famous production is a lengthy sermon-lecture series called “Constants on the Path of Jihad,” which emphasizes the global nature of holy war: “If a particular people or nation is classified as ... ‘the people of war’ in the Shariah, that classification applies to them all over the earth.” But “Constants” isn’t really his own creation; it’s an adaptation of a work written by a Saudi militant killed in 2003. At most, Mr. Awlaki is a popularizer, someone who takes the work of others and makes it his own.

When he preached in the United States, first in San Diego and then in Virginia, he exploited his knowledge of Arabic and his Yemeni heritage to burnish his credentials as a genuine Islamic voice. He has been linked to Maj. Nidal Hassan, the psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at a Texas Army base in 2009, and some of the 9/11 hijackers attended his services. But until the Obama administration put him on its hit list, he had little standing in the Arab world.

Now, however, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is taking advantage of this free advertising. No propaganda from the group had ever mentioned his name before it was reported in January that the United States had decided he could be legally assassinated. Shortly after, an article in the official Qaeda journal trumpeted that Mr. Awlaki had not been killed in December, as had been reported, in an air attack on a gathering in Shabwa Province.

So now that it has given Mr. Awlaki such a high profile, the administration is in a bind: if it ignores him, it will look powerless; if it succeeds in killing him, it will have manufactured a martyr. The best way out is to redouble its efforts to track down the real, more dangerous leaders of the Yemen group like Mr. Wuhayshi and Mr. Asiri, who likely made the bombs used in the parcel attacks and carried by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called Christmas Day bomber.

Mr. Awlaki’s name may be the only one Americans know, but that doesn’t make him the most dangerous threat to our security.