As the NATO defense ministers departed Brussels on March 11, French and British efforts to build support for military action had seen mixed results at best. Several factors worked against support for intervention in the United States. On one hand, the U.S. public was starting to pay more attention to the crisis, and the frequency with which the White House Press Office answered questions on Libya was growing: at least one senior White House official saw this as an indication that Libya had become a “water cooler issue.” On the whole, however, after a decade of war, and amid continuing economic troubles, the American public was sorely fatigued of military intervention. Pew Research Center polling in the second week in March found that less than a third of Americans favored helping the rebels militarily. By comparison, the Clinton administration had enjoyed 47 percent support for the 1999 Kosovo intervention at the outset. The Obama administration’s focus on ending the protracted wars of the past decade meanwhile created a certain cognitive dissonance in its debates over whether or not to intervene in Libya, and a growing movement within the administration to “rebalance” U.S. commitments away from the Middle East toward Asia worked against intervention in North Africa. There was no lack of sympathy or concern for the plight of the Libyan people, but Libyans were not the only ones in the world being brutalized by their leaders, even if Qaddafi’s threats to his population were the most disturbing at that particular moment. Perhaps most of all, other than the French and British, no one else was volunteering for the job, and it was very uncertain how much even these key allies could accomplish without U.S. support. This meant that if there was to be an intervention the United States would have to play a significant role – and probably foot much of the bill. But in spite of these obstacles, in the course of a few short days, the United States pivoted from reticence about intervention to a full court press for military action that was more aggressive than anyone had so far proposed.