"One of the biggest impediments has been the cohesion and the organization of the opposition relative to the Assad forces," Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview.
The seemingly high level of support for action on climate change may help to understand why so many here appear to have been caught off guard by the scope and organization of the opposition, which was able to rally thousands in Sydney and the capital Canberra within weeks of the announcement.
But in the early 90's he became close to Richard Perle, who was an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, and in 1992, in the wake of the first gulf war, he founded the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization of Iraqi opposition groups in exile.
Mr. Warren was detained briefly on Wednesday for observing a meeting of the National Democratic Alliance, an umbrella organization for opposition groups.
Activists said that the main umbrella organizations of the opposition, both the Syrian National Council and the Free Syrian Army, had committed to the cease-fire but that it was unclear if they held sway over the loose coalition of armed men arrayed against the government.
After the Inter-American Court's ruling, an umbrella organization of Venezuela's opposition parties welcomed Mr. López's plan to run in a primary planned for February.
Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization that represents a variety of opposition groups, said his organization had no advance knowledge that the Iraqi Embassy in Germany would be seized and did not condone the action.
In 1976 she founded Asian Women in Solidarity, a grass-roots organization that grew out of opposition to "sex tourism" conducted for well-heeled visitors to Asia.
The question of how Clinton's administration would operate is trickier, but hacked campaign emails released by WikiLeaks over the past month paint a picture of an organization that is contemptuous of opposition, often obsessed with how an issue is perceived, and yet sometimes prone to decisions that seem self-defeating and dance on the knife's edge of political disaster.
The dead included nine people in the northern province of Idlib, near the Turkish border, according to the Local Coordination Committees, an umbrella group of opposition organizations.
