The national security adviser during President Jimmy Carter's administration says the U.S. should confront Israeli jets if that nation chooses to take military action against Iran's nuclear threat.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, in an interview with the Daily Beast website, declared, "We are not exactly impotent little babies."

Israel long has been thought to be considering a military strike against the Islamic regime's suspected development of nuclear weapon technology. Israel has stated it is unwilling to be threatened by a leader with access to nuclear weapons who believes it should be wiped off the map, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared.

But an Israeli attack on Iran probably would have to fly over coalition airspace in Iraq.

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

Get your dictionary to the Middle East: "Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict"

He said the U.S. has to be "serious" about denying Israel the right to attack.

"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.

"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.

WND columnist and New York Times best-selling author Mike Evans wrote about Brzezinski just before the 2008 election, explaining how Obama added Brzezinski to his list of "advisers."

"One of Brzezinski's first jobs as adviser was to defend Obama's plan, if elected, to meet with Iran and Syria: 'What's the hand-up about negotiating with the Syrians or Iranians?' asked Brzezinski. 'What it in effect means is that you only talk to people who agree with you.'

"People who agree with you?" wrote Evans. "I, for one, would like to know just why Obama would want to talk with Iran's president who denies the Holocaust, has called Israel a 'stinking corpse' and vowed to wipe it off the map."

WND columnist Ben Shapiro noted about that time Brzezinski "believes that the Jewish lobby forces America into pro-Israel policy, and he defends Carter's anti-Semitic book, "Peace, Not Apartheid."

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