Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1977

JERUSALEM – Both the Israeli government and the military here refused to respond to comments by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, who said the U.S. should confront Israeli jets if that nation chooses to take military action against Iran's nuclear installations.

"We will not dignify Brzezinski with a response," a source in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office told WND.

Netanyahu's spokesmen and the Israel Defense Forces refused to provide an official reply.

Discussing the possibility of an Israeli airstrike against Iran, Brzezinski declared in an interview with the Daily Beast website, "We are not exactly impotent little babies."

"Are we just going to sit there and watch?" Brzezinski asked.

He said the U.S. has to be "serious" about denying Israel the right to fly over U.S.-patrolled airspace in Iraq to attack Iran.

"That means a denial where you aren't just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not," he said.

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"No one wishes for this, but it could be a Liberty in reverse," he said.

The Liberty was a U.S. ship in international waters in the Middle East during the Six-Day War in 1967 that was hit by Israeli gunfire.

Brzezinski advised Carter on confrontations in Iran, Afghanistan and the Middle East during Carter's White House tenure.

He said the Obama administration also already should have developed "a clearer position on what we are prepared to do to promote a Palestinian-Israeli peace."

"Simply giving a frequent-traveler ticket to George Mitchell is not the same thing as policy. It took a long time to get going on Iran, but there is an excuse there, the Iranian domestic mess. And we are now eight months into the administration, and I would have thought by now we could have formulated a strategy that we would have considered 'our' strategy for dealing with Iran and Pakistan," he said.

"For example, the Carter administration, which is sometimes mocked, by now had in motion a policy of disarmament with the Russians, which the Russians didn't like, but eventually bought; it had started a policy of normalization with the Chinese; it rammed through the Panama Canal treaty; and it was moving very, very openly toward an Israeli-Arab political peace initiative," he said.

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