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The answer to your questions is no, they do not have effective military or police forces. It is obvious that both organizations are infiltrated by terrorists or their sympathizers. There is no vast majority.

I think Scotland Yard will be dismayed. The truth is that the vast majority of our allies DO have functional police forces and military forces as well. Japan, Australia, Great Britain, West Germany, etc.

If you will kindly remove your focus from Iraq and Afghanistan for a moment, you will realize that vast numbers of our troops are deployed to noncombat positions elsewhere.

If you are not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan I don’t have a clue about where you are talking about.

There is the problem. To save time, just check a little on where US troops are based. I think the number of locations (globally) will surprise you. When you look at the internal capabilities of those countries (outside of present combat areas) you will find that we have assumed a significant portion of their self-defense role, to our great expense.

The interests protected are those which have benefitted from the policies which have hurt domestic industry, and by extension of that our economic base. We create wealth when we take raw materials and transform them into finished goods. Only we are paying others to do that for us, partly because our own environmental and other regulations have made it darned difficult for our own industry to do so. Our military support of others who do the dirty work is the extra payment in blood and treasure for cheap goods at home, but the dark side includes the degredation of our capabilities to extract and develop our own resources and manufacture our own goods. Americans, fooled by the walmart prices are only beginning to see the writing on the wall, with an entire class of manufacturing jobs missing from the recovery.

Had Americans felt the pain of regulation here at home at the checkout counter, I surmise that such regulations would not be in place beyond that which was clearly in the public interest, and we would retain much of aour ability to produce our own at a reasonable cost.

When the dollar is rendered worthless by the economic machinations in Washington, what will we buy foreign goods with? By then, we will have lost to attrition much of the workforce which understood the nuts and bolts of prospecting for, developing, and utilizing our own resources and that will leave us in a position where we will not be able to fight a protracted conflict anywhere on the planet. Our manufacturing sector (heavy industry) has already been gutted in the past three decades. Only one steel mill in the country was producing the steel to up-armor Humvees, for instance.

The "Arsenal of Democracy" will not be able to get'er done, and the coffers will be full of worthless paper.

IF you understand the concept of total warfare, this could not have been better orchestrated by an enemy, even if it is likely the result of wholesale stupidity.

So the many of the 'interests' we protect are the interests of only a relative few, not the long term interests of our Nation.

YMMV