Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter told CNN interviewer Larry King  that Yassir Arafat would have been assassinated by fellow Arabs if he had accepted the peace offer made by Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak in negotiations fostered by U.S. President Bill Clinton in the waning day's of the Clinton presidency.

Carter said the Barak-Clinton offer left Israel in control of the roads between various Palestinian towns and cities, and also would have Palestinians acknowledging Israeli sovereignty over Eastern Jerusalem.

The man who brokered the 1979 peace deal between Egypt's President Anwar Sadat and Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin said he was hopeful that the situation in the Middle East may be improving in the wake of Arafat's death on Nov. 11 in a Paris hospital.  Carter said the test would be whether Israel would permit free elections throughout the Palestinian authorities—a situation he said his Atlanta-based Carter Center would monitor.

The former U.S. President gave Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon little credit for the improvement in the Middle East's political atmosphere, despite Sharon's plans for Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.  Carter said Sharon has not indicated Israel's willingness to withdraw from the West Bank.

Asked if he would monitor elections in Iraq, Carter responded that he doubted that he would be invited to do so by the current U.S. President, George W. Bush.

The Carter interview was one segment on a three-part program that also featured CBS commentator Andy Rooney—who, like Carter, was pushing a new book—and former Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, who recently announced she was being treated for breast cancer.

King asked Elizabeth Edwards if, after having lost a 16-year-old son, Wade, in a jeep accident, and now experiencing this, she ever felt—

—"Like Job?" she asked in anticipation of his question.  She then answered that  she had learned, as Rabbi Harold Kushner put it in his famous book, that "bad things happen to good people."

The vice presidential candidate's wife announced she had discovered a lump in her breast the day after Sen. John Kerry and her husband lost the election to incumbents George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.  In an upbeat interview, the Edwards stressed that, although she is getting considerable media attention, millions of women across America have faced or are facing the same situation. 

Elizabeth Edwards urged women to get annual breast check-ups.  King extracted a promise from John Edwards that he also would have a prostate test as part of his annual checkup.
—Donald H. Harrison