Gentle readers,

There seems to be a certain amount of confusion about what - if anything - I actually do in Madrid.  Some think that I do nothing at all and others suspect some nefarious purpose.  Let me try to explain.  [editor's note - this is not my excuse for a Christmas card, or at least that wasn't the plan back in mid-November when I started writing it.  I have good intentions about sending actual cards this year, and it just may happen.   This is just me finally finishing something that I've been meaning to do for a long time.]

Spain is the second most touristed country in the world, not to mention the #2 country for US student exchanges.  And for good reason.  Spain has all sorts of historic things, yummy food, friendly inhabitants, and natural beauty, much like, well, everywhere else in the world.  But there is something special here.  I arrived in August, a magical month when the entire country closes down and goes to the beach.  Good idea.  Recently we had a three-day work week in which both Tuesday and Thursday were national holidays.  Another fine idea.  Though Spaniards work the longest hours in the world after the US, they also take a nice long lunch which often includes not only an actual fork and knife but also a cup of wine and an espresso, breaking up the afternoon quite nicely.  It's altogether civilized.

My working conditions are also civilized.  For the first time in my life, I have my own office, with my own door, window, and thermostat.  The Embassy is on what the guidebooks call the top shopping street in Madrid, barely a five-minute walk from my apartment.  The Embassy building itself is quite hideous, despite the plaque proclaiming architectural significance, but at least it is in the pedestrian-friendly heart of the city rather than out in the 'burbs like all the new ones.  And it is not surrounded by 12-foot temporary concrete barriers, razor wire, bad guys with itchy mortar fingers, and 120,000 US troops.

Right, so what do I actually do?  The important thing to understand is that we don't care all that much about what's happening in Spain.  Unlike El Salvador or Iraq, to pick two random examples, we aren't too worried about democracy failing here, or the soldiers coming out of their barracks, or the economy collapsing.  While we surely have opinions on domestic political issues - and need to know what's happening and why - we don't meddle in debates about how religious education is funded and whether the Catalan region can call itself a "nation."

What we do instead is talk with Spain about domestic issues in other countries:  election monitors in Bolivia, peacekeepers in Darfur, provincial reconstruction in Afghanistan, everything in Venezuela, disarmament in Colombia, progress in Israel/Palestine, everything in Cuba, etc.  When I say talk, I mean push.  We want the Spanish to send election monitors, write a check, send spare helicopter parts to a country that just had a natural disaster, vote a certain way in Unesco, be nicer to Cuban dissidents.  And not only do we want the Spanish to do these things, we want them to encourage the alphabet soup int'l organizations (EU, NATO, UN, OSCE, UNESCO) and their allies in those organizations to do them as well.

So on any given morning, we find a message from Our Headquarters instructing Embassy Madrid, along with all the European embassies, or all the Latin American posts, or All Diplomatic And Consular posts, to present a set of points and a request for some action to "the appropriate level" of our host government.  Depending on the issue (I cover Latin America, political military issues, Africa, NATO, Asia, and human rights), one of us has to deliver those points to someone in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs either by visiting them or by faxing over the points and then talking on the phone.  Sometimes, it takes a series of these exchanges to get a decision.  And of course sometimes we don't like the decision, so we have to try again and again.  This, in current Washington-speak, is 'transformational diplomacy' - not just observing and reporting, but trying to influence.

As part of this, we have a lot of visitors (Congressmen, State Dept bigwigs, etc.) who come to meet with people in the Spanish government.  The visits are useful, but as a serf, I spend a lot of time setting up meetings, rescheduling the meetings at the last moment, escorting the visitors to the meetings, and then writing about what they all said.  We also do a lot of Congressionally-mandated Annual Reports:  human rights, trafficking in persons, religious freedom, INSCR something or other that has to do with drugs.  Each of these reports belongs to a different fiefdom back in Washington, and we spend as much time negotiating the text as we do actually investigating and writing the report.  Obviously this stuff is pretty low on the glamor factor.

This may not sound much like work to some people.  Yes it's true that I don't make or sell widgets, put out fires, sweep streets, or teach children to color inside the lines.  And yes, it is also true that while on the federal clock, I've toured a shipyard, met the Foreign Minister, read the newspaper, spent four days in Brussels, had coffee with countless NGO, military, and government folks, visited a museum, feasted with Spain's national security council staff, and several other non-work-like activities.  But it's my job and by gosh someone has to do it.

Now that that's settled, I'll write more next time on Spain and just how good a $5 bottle of Spanish red wine can be.

Merry Christmas, and very best wishes for 2006,

Rob