A FUNNY THING happened to Condoleezza Rice on her way to Europe last week. Even before the secretary of State began her five-day swing through Germany, Romania, Ukraine, and Belgium, American news media started framing her trip not as an important series of bi-lateral meetings on pressing topics–the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, say, or Afghanistan’s stabilization, and Iran’s worrisome nuclear ambitions–but as a kind of high-wire act, far more compelling stuff, in which the secretary’s deliciously daunting task was to convince skeptical European allies that the United States treats its detainees, on average, better than the North Vietnamese treated their guests at the Hanoi Hilton.