- Archives

It had all the trappings of a modern-day Daniel in the Lion's Den: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice venturing bravely into the heart of French intellectual opposition to America, the Institute of Political Sciences, an elite school in the heart of Paris's trendy Left Bank. But if the roar from the audience was mostly polite and restrained, that was partly because only a handful of the school's 5,500 students were allowed near the auditorium where Rice spoke, and the initial questions were vetted in advance by the school and the State Department. The first student chosen to question Rice was 24-year-old Benjamin Barnier, the son of Foreign Minister Michel Barnier. He asked Rice about the possibility that Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority might opt to form a theocratic government, allowing Rice to expound on the evolution of Iraqi democracy as a process of negotiation. But that was not the question Barnier had wanted to ask most, he said later. That one, submitted to the school on Monday as required under the ground rules, was: "George Bush is not particularly well perceived in the world, particularly in the Middle East. Can you do something to change that?" That question was rejected, but he was told he could ask about the Shiites. "I gave two, and they chose one," Barnier said. A State Department official said later that the U.S. Embassy had only asked the school to choose five people to ask the first two questions and that the rest could come from anyone. [more]