Americans are more likely to say they disapprove than approve of the U.S. military action in Libya. That represents a shift from three months ago, just after the mission began, when approval exceeded disapproval.

U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama is expected to arrive in South Africa on Monday to meet with women's groups, speak about the importance of education and youth leadership, as well as take in the sights. Yet many say there's another unstated aspect of the trip: soothing prickly ties between the U.S. and South Africa.

The alliance has grappled with diverging internal views over whether NATO should be an instrument of "hard" combat missions—generally the U.S. view—or the preference among some in Europe for "soft" power, like "humanitarian, development, peacekeeping, and talking tasks," as Gates put it.

While intelligence analysts squinted at their reporting ... struggling to understand who the Libyan rebels were, the exiled diplomats recognized some surprising old contacts. A number of the opposition leaders, it turned out, had participated in the U.S. embassy's public diplomacy programs.

Most accounts from rights activists as well as journalists on the scene and sociologists analyzing the situation clearly show that Facebook had an enormous influence on the start and spread of the uprisings, as well as their apparent domino effect. It served a primary means of communication.

Africa – once considered the lab for Chinese companies’ reach outside - is being relegated into a destination with too many risk factors. Safer political destinations and countries closer to home are likely to benefit from the shift. The readjustment has been in the works for some time but the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have made those subtle shifts more pronounced.

The Nobel Prize − that ultimate soft-power statement − must now compete with alternative human rights awards. Gadhafi could bestow his own award on Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from one moral paragon to another.

There was reason to worry that AFRICOM, which would lead the Operation Odssey Dawn, was too green, and its mandate too soft, for it to perform up to U.S. standards. Yet in launching the U.S. intervention in Libya, AFRICOM, led by its commander, General Carter Ham, acquitted itself well.