Lost in Translation

Illustration by Bob AulUntil Orange County businessman George L. Argyros became U.S. ambassador to Spain two years ago, Spaniards last worried about Islamic terrorism on January 2, 1492. On that winter day, after an 11-year siege, a Catholic Spanish army under the command of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille conquered the city of Granada, the last Moorish stronghold of the Umayyad caliphate. The victory ended nearly 800 years of Muslim power in Western Europe and marked Christianity's arrival as a global force. A couple of months later, Christopher Columbus sailed from the port city of Palos toward the New World.

The fall of Granada remains a sore spot for Islamic radicals; vague threats about retaking the country where Islam reached its intellectual and cultural pinnacle have erupted occasionally over the centuries. But talk of an Islamic reconquista was just talk until a devastating train attack in Madrid killed 200 people and injured over 1,400 last Thursday.

Investigators are closing in on Islamic extremists tied to al Qaeda; many Spaniards blame The United States, and took out their fury on Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, whose conservative Popular Party closely aligned itself with Washington's global War on Terror. Before the blast, Aznar's handpicked successor led in the polls; three days after, Spaniards went to their voting places and swept away the conservatives. The Popular Party was no longer so popular.

If Spaniards could vote on the U.S. ambassador, it seems pretty clear that Argyros would be back home in Newport Beach, lunching at the Pacific Club by midweek. With 200 dead in Madrid, Socialists now in power and pulling Spain out of the U.S. alliance in Iraq, and America's fiction of a global alliance reduced to the UK, Tonga and a few others, it's time to wonder about the wisdom of sending an Orange County businessman to do a diplomat's work.

*** Argyros doesn't mix with the common man. His knack is for alchemizing financial power into political juice to create more money. That gift has served him well in Orange County—a subject to which we'll return in a moment—but it has served him (and therefore his country) less well in Madrid. There, Argyros and the U.S. misled themselves, believing that getting Aznar to sign on to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the same as getting the endorsement of Spain, where upwards of 90 percent of the population is opposed to U.S. strategy. When the bombs went off in Madrid on the day Europeans now call 3-11, the deficiencies of that strategy—all leaders, no followers—was briefly, brightly illuminated.

Argyros isn't returning our calls, but we can imagine that the election of the Socialists has surprised him. Any diplomat in touch with the people rather than a few leaders would have seen it coming. But Argyros is no diplomat.

Those of us who live in Orange County already know that. We know George Argyros as the major player (estimated wealth in the low one-billion range) who could buy political support for such pet projects as the drive to build the unpopular El Toro International Airport. But if Spaniards didn't know him when he arrived in Madrid two years ago, they met him last month.

On Feb. 6, Argyros granted an exclusive newspaper interview—his first in over a year—to Berna Harbour of El País, the New York Times of Spain. The result was journalism at its hard-hitting best:

Harbour: How do you feel being an American ambassador in a country so opposed to the policies of the United States?

Argyros: Against some policies, not all. It's not always easy when people aren't in agreement with all the questions, but they'll never be in agreement with everything—not even my wife.

I don't agree with you. I don't think that Europe is against the United States. We have disagreements, and we're always going to have disagreements with some questions. But I don't have the feeling as ambassador that our disagreements are so serious so that we can't be friends. We're friends. We have a coalition of members, that's why I'm not in agreement with you.

The people? That's the press, what I mean to say is, the influence of the press. But that doesn't worry me. What worries me is what we do, what our countries do, their foreign policies. We have a difficult role today. Everyone notices the United States when they have a problem of this type, and I like where we're at.

The interview perfectly captures Argyros, the businessman and ambassador—his dismissal of popular opinion as a mere product of media manipulation, his confusion of governments with their citizens. The rest of the interview is similarly strained, and though Argyros goes on to admit that the United States erred in attacking Iraq based on claims of WMDs, he challenges Berna: if "someone has a better way of doing it, may they tell it to the rest of the world, but I don't believe that anyone does."