Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell under President George W. Bush, on Thursday warned that the chemical weapons that were reportedly used in Syria could be a “Israeli false flag operation” because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was running an “inept regime.”

During an interview with Current TV’s Cenk Uygur, Wilkerson explained that he had been told by his sources in the intelligence community that evidence that Syria had used chemical weapons was “really flaky” and that President Barack Obama should think twice before intervening.

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“This could have been an Israeli false flag operation,” he said. “You’ve got basically a geo-strategically, geo-political — if you will — inept regime in Tel Aviv right now.”

Wilkerson pointed to the fact that Obama had to tell Netanyahu to “pick up the phone, you idiot,” and call Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to apologize for a Israeli raid that killed killed eight Turkish civilians aboard a Gaza-bound flotilla in 2010.

“Look at Israel’s situation right now, it’s as dangerous as it’s been since 1948,” Wilkerson remarked. “You’ve got Lebanon growing increasingly unstable with [Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hasan] Nasrallah and Hezbollah having more and more political power. You’ve got Syria involved in a brutal civil war. You’ve got Iraq in Iran’s back pocket with [Iraq Prime Minister] Nuri al-Maliki, the Sunnis realizing that and restating the civil war. You’ve got Saudi Arabia funding the Sunnis in Iraq. You’ve got Jordan, whose king has publicly said he wished he weren’t the king. You’ve got Egypt in an untenable position, no longer the security that Israel needed on that flank.”

“So Israel is in a very, very dangerous situation right now. The president has got to be very circumspect about what he does in exacerbating that situation. Netanyahu is clueless as to this. I hope that President Obama gave him a lecture into geo-strategic realities.”

Watch the video below from Current TV’s The Young Turks, broadcast May 3, 2013.