Here's a puzzle. A video calling for international action to capture Joseph Kony, a Ugandan guerilla who commands a couple hundred men and has killed 151 civilians during the past year, has been viewed by a whopping 76 million people on Youtube. Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad -- who boasts 600,000 men under arms, along with almost 5,000 battle tanks, and who often kills over 100 people a day, according to activists -- generates exponentially less outrage.

The imbalance is particularly striking on Twitter. According to al-Jazeera social media head Riyaad Minty, the #Syria hashtag has been used around 6.6 million times over the last three months. By comparison, the #Kony hashtag has been used 11.5 million times -- in the past seven days. Obviously, there's something about Joseph Kony that pushes an audience's buttons in a way that Syria fails to do.

I asked Minty why he thinks that is. He said that he wasn't surprised by the disparity in the coverage between Syria and Joseph Kony: The uprising in Syria, after all, has been dragging on for a year, and the coverage -- often captured in grainy YouTube clips or dry accounts of dozens of people slaughtered in an anonymous city -- isn't favorable for attracting a wider audience.

"Syria isn't as personal, in terms of the narrative that is being presented," Minty said. "There's a lot of death and destruction, but it just doesn't have that personal connection for people."

The Kony video, by comparison, is just the opposite. It was professionally produced, told a straightforward story of victims and villains, and advanced a simple message: Stop Kony.  "The way it was done -- it was like a Hollywood production," said Minty. "It was very slick, it was targeted to a very specific audience, and it got people's emotions up because you could connect with it."

That's the formula for attracting the likes of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga to your cause, and becoming the fastest-growing viral video of all time. Syria, where the debate over intervention often seems to be a choice between a series of flawed options and journalists in the country have reportedly been targeted by Assad's forces, will have a hard time duplicating the Kony video's success.

The bigger question is whether any of this Internet-based sturm und drang can be translated into real-world action. Minty found that, during the peak of global interest in the Kony video, only about 140 tweets came out of Uganda regarding the story, and that Ugandans wrote only about 2,000 comments on Facebook out of a pool of 5 million -- a drop in the bucket compared to the deluge of comments coming from the United States and Europe.

Sure, many Syrians would love to see a viral video bringing international attention to the Assad regime's atrocities. But it's going to be the hard realities on the ground, and the decisions made by calculating men in foreign capitals -- not YouTube -- that determines the future of Syria.

Ali Tarhouni, Libya's former minister of finance and acting prime minister, has had a busy year. He began 2011 as a professor of economics at the University of Washington, only to rush back to his home country, from which he had been exiled for decades, as the revolution gained steam. He was charged with establishing some semblance of order over the Benghazi-based government's finances during the war, and then took the first steps to incorporate the rebel militias into a national army in the capital of Tripoli.

Now out of government, he was in Washington last week to deliver a personal letter of thanks from Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council (NTC), to top U.S. policymakers for standing with Libya's rebels in their war to oust Muammar al-Qaddafi.

"That stand -- that moral courageous stand -- changed dramatically the kind of relationship that the United States can have with this part of the world, with Libya," he told Foreign Policy. "The door is wide open ... to build a more strategic relationship between the two countries."

One aspect of that relationship will certainly be cooperation on developing Libya's extensive energy reserves. Tarhouni noted that Libya's oil production had recently reached 1 million barrels a day - a figure that had even shocked both Libyan officials, he said, who initially hadn't expected to reach 500,000 barrels a day by the end of the year.

"There are no foreign companies there, no kind of consulting ... all this is done by Libyan hands and minds and brains and bravery," he said. "The difference is that now people feel that they own these institutions, and that feeling of ownership is what made this revolution successful."

None of this is to say that it's all smooth sailing for Libya from here. As the country witnessed so painfully under Qaddafi, the massive influx of oil revenue can be used to concentrate power in the hands of a few just as easily as rebuild the country. Tarhouni, however, said that the NTC had learned its lesson from the Qaddafi era -- he pointed to the website for Libya's National Oil Company, which lists all the oil contracts signed and shipments sold, as a step forward for transparency.

"Will it be a perfect story? No," he said. "[But] it will not be the same sad story as before."

The interim government's struggle to establish control over the many militias operating in the country has also caused it to clash with its erstwhile ally, Qatar. Abdel Jalil slammed the oil-rich emirate last month for undertaking actions in Libya "that we as the NTC don't know about" -- a criticism that Tarhouni expanded on.

"I think what they have done is basically support the Muslim Brotherhood, and I think that's an infringement on the sovereignty of the country," he said. "They have brought armaments, and they have given them to people that we don't know -- I think paid money to just about everybody. They intervened in committees that have control over security issues."

Qatar admitted that hundreds of its soldiers were on the ground during the Libya war to help the rebels topple Qaddafi, but has denied charges that it is interfering in Libyan politics.

So, what's next for Tarhouni? He said he will found a new political party, which he describes as a movement that can bring ordinary Libyans into the political process. Without such an option, he fears, the political space could be seized by Islamist movements.

"There's a political vacuum in the country," he said. "The only organized group is the Muslim Brotherhood. They're small, but they're well-organized and financed."

Sounds like it's going to be another busy year.

Rarely has a human rights report been accompanied by as much hoopla as the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry's (BICI) investigation. The report, which examines the government's crackdown during domestic unrest in February and March, was published on Nov. 23.  Its release was accompanied by a televised speech by the BICI's head, Cherif Bassiouni, accusing King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa's security forces of operating with a sense of impunity, and using torture and excessive force to quell the protests.

The 501-page tome (warning: large .pdf file ahead) is a tough read. It neglects to name the officials responsible for human rights violations, and often falls back on a "he said-she said" account of events that leaves readers none the wiser about what took place. But there are a few sections of the report that shed new light on the abortive revolution that occurred on the island kingdom in February and March.

The first protester's death: The first casualty in Bahrain's crackdown occurred on Feb. 14, when police killed Ali Abdulhadi Almeshaima in the village of Daih. As the report makes clear, Almeshaima's death galvanized the protest movement, as demonstrators took to the street for his funeral and to express outrage over the killing. The government's story is that Almeshaima was participating in a demonstration and was killed after the protesters attacked a nearby police unit, while his family claims that he was shot by a police unit in cold blood, "for no apparent reason."

On page 224, the commission comes down on the side of Almeshaima's family:

"The death of Mr Almeshaima can be attributed to the use of excessive force by police officers. At the time of the shooting, there were no reports of any disturbances in the Daih area. Furthermore, the fact that Mr Almeshaima was shot in the back at close range indicates that there was no justification for the use of lethal force."

The death toll: The casualties from Bahrain's uprising is a matter of some dispute -- the Bahrain Center for Human Rights has listed 46 people that it says were killed by excessive force from the country's security forces. The BICI, however, finds that 35 people will killed during the revolt.

On page 214, it breaks down its death toll: 13 civilians were reportedly killed by security forces, five people died from torture, eight civilians died from unattributed causes, four expatriate workers were killed by both civilians and security forces, and five policy and army officers died during the unrest.

Fake blood: One of the narratives pushed by pro-government supporters is that protesters smeared fake blood over themselves to exaggerate, for media consumption, the brutality of the security forces' crackdown. Among the government's charges against 20 imprisoned medical workers, which it accuses of colluding with the protesters, is that they provided demonstrators with donor blood for just this purpose, and also gave atropine to some individuals to imitate nerve gas injuries -- again for media consumption.

The BICI report, on pages 74 and 75, appears to confirm the rumors that protesters used fake blood in at least one Feb. 18 protest:

"The protesters approached the BDF barricade at approximately 17:00 and demanded access to the roundabout. According to subsequent BDF investigations, the protesters began to verbally abuse the military personnel deployed in the area and to shout anti-government slogans. Reports also indicated that certain individuals among the demonstrators smeared their bodies with red liquid to feign injuries that could be recorded and subsequently aired on the internet and on satellite news channels."

Torture: The most explosive segment of the report relates to the torture and death of protesters at the hands of Bahrain's security forces. Strangely, in the case of two of the five protesters who died in police custody from torture, officers tried to cover up their crimes by listing the cause of death as related to sickle cell anemia.

On pages 238 and 239, the report recounts a witness's statement about the events that  led to the death of Zakariya Rashid Hassan al-Asheri on April 9:

"The witness stated that all the detainees in the same cell were blindfolded and handcuffed, and forced to lie on their stomachs. On one of the mornings, the deceased began to experience hallucinations or confusion, whereby he began banging on the door shouting his name. The prison guards shouted at him to be quiet and when he did not comply, they entered his cell. The witness heard the deceased being beaten and he heard him scream after each beating. The witness then heard a shuffling noise after which the deceased‘s shouts became muffled. The witness then heard a Pakistani say in Urdu, 'He is dead.'"