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QUOTES-Hotlines and cool heads: Lessons in crisis

by reuters | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Friday, 24 September 2010 11:02 GMT

Sept 24 (Reuters) - Nations are unprepared for the likely emergence of a breed of complex crisis with the potential to plunge markets and regions into prolonged turmoil, experts say.

World leaders are still too parochial in their security planning and must act more nimbly and closely, analysts say.

Following are comments about crisis management from participants and observers.

ANDY HAYMAN, FORMER ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER, SPECIAL OPERATIONS, METROPOLITAN POLICE, LONDON

"There's a bomb attack and all hell breaks loose. Everyone scrambles -- emergency responders, police, the intelligence agencies, government departments. Within an hour we're pulled off the job and summoned to a COBRA (crisis) meeting in Whitehall...The politics tended to dominate much of the thinking and decision-making when we should have been setting it aside to focus on the operational response to the crisis."

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, FORMER U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE/NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER

"Despite all of the sophisticated hierarchy, sophisticated command and control equipment that we had, at that moment much of it didn't function very well, and people instead did whatever they could to communicate messages.

"And frankly, we then had to make it up."

(On White House officials' response on Sept. 11, 2001)

LYNDON JOHNSON, U.S. PRESIDENT, 1963-69

"The overriding importance of the hotline was that it engaged immediately the heads of government and their top advisers, forcing prompt attention and decisions. There was unusual value in this, but also danger.

"We had to weigh carefully every word and phrase. I took special pains not only to handle the crisis deliberately but to set a quiet, unhurried tone for our discussions."

ROBERT McNAMARA, U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, 1961-68

(On participating in the 1961 crisis over the occupation status of Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the 1967 Middle East war.)

"In no one of the three incidents did either ... (the United States or the Soviet Union) intend to act in a way that would lead to military conflict. But on each of the occasions, lack of information, misinformation, and misjudgments led to confrontation. And in each of them, as the crisis evolved, tensions heightened, emotions rose, and the danger of irrational decisions increased."

CHUNG MIN LEE, YONSEI UNIVERSITY, SEOUL, AND INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES

"I believe in hotlines, and they were useful in previous crises during the Cold War, but I'm not sure how valuable they're going to be in cataclysmic crises."

"The current spat between China and Japan ... is an example whereby lines of communication are plentiful between Beijing and Tokyo yet political temperatures are still flaring. The most obvious symbolic value of hotlines is that both sides have access to communication even during a major flare-up -- what actual good may arise from them is a different matter."

ELIZA MANNINGHAM-BULLER, EX-CHIEF, UK'S MI5 SECURITY SERVICE

"We shall see terrorist attacks involving chemical, biological and radioactive weapons. New threats, currently unanticipated, will arise, putting a premium on flexibility of response ... Attempts at cyber attack will proliferate ... More states will acquire nuclear weapons: means of delivery will become more sophisticated and long-range."

(Overview of likely threats in 21st century)

VALERIE AMOS, U.N. UNDERSECRETARY-GENERAL FOR HUMANITARIAN AFFAIRS

"As a world community we are facing larger and larger disasters. Can we just operate in the way that we have operated in the past? I don't think so. So we need to find new ways of working, new systems of funding..."

(Reuters, Rice interview with Britain's Channel 4 television 2010, The Vantage Point by L.B. Johnson, Blundering into Disaster by Robert McNamara, The Terrorist Hunters by Andy Hayman, March 2010 Lecture "Reflections on Intelligence" by Eliza Manningham-Buller) (Editing by Mark Heinrich)

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