For an example of how the White House is losing the aura of leadership feature the news from Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts. While President Obama is vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, the Associated Press is reporting that the White House wants the man convicted of downing Pan Am Flight 103 to be returned to prison at Scotland. The killer, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, was released on the grounds that his cancer was so bad he had but months to live. But he’s still alive and living in Libya, and the whole thing turns out to have been a trick by feckless authorities in Britain to get in a better position for oil deals with Colonel Gadhafi.

The way the administration is handling this betrayal is with wheedling. President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, was quoted by the Britain’s state broadcasting arm, the BBC, as expressing the “strong conviction” to Scottish officials that al-Megrahi be brought back to jail. The BBC also quoted a statement from Secretary Clinton as saying that America continued to “categorically disagree” with the decision to release al-Megrahi and wants him to “serve out the entirety of his sentence” in Scotland. “We have and will continue to reiterate this position to the Scottish and Libyan authorities,” she threatened.

With both the Arabs and — far more importantly — our own voters, this is a losing strategy. The right strategy is to say nothing until America is in a position to announce that al-Megrahi is in an American prison, having been delivered there by our covert services, and will be tried by a military commission here and, if convicted, put to death. There is little doubt that our courts would sustain such a strategy, a point that the editor of the Sun made a year ago and that these columns have made more recently. If Libya wants to interrupt our oil contracts, so be it. But most of the world would completely understand and respect such an act — and so would the American voters.