How is it that the airports, customs, and immigration allowed this to pass through in the first place? Wouldn't this have set off some sort of "warning"?

So, it'll work in America?

Is arming locals really that bad an idea though? Our problem in the past was that we picked religious zealots as our allies and armed them, while ignoring the not-so-religious ones we could have supported. Here with ISIS, we could arm the Kurds and support them; the Kurds are not terribly religious (not too different from your typical Sunday Christians here in the US), and are willing to fight ISIS, but we don't want to support them too much because we don't want them demanding their own state, because that works against our interest in keeping the region destabilized. If we stopped working towards keeping the region unstable, and instead helped out groups like the Kurds who want independence, which would make the whole region far more stable, groups like ISIS would die out.

Unfortunately, there are always going to be radicals, and eventually, some extremist is going to get the wrong idea and decide to start their own "terrorist state". Even the most peaceful religions, like Buddhism, have their radicals that go around pillaging.

You do realize that Republicans of today aren't the same as the Republicans of the 1860s, right? When it comes to the oldest Republicans still alive and in power today, they're still 6 or 7 generations removed from the Republicans of those days. Political parties can undergo massive changes within just a single generation. When you're talking 6 to 10 generations difference, the policies sure as fuck aren't the same!

Exactly. The Republicans you speak of are from the Civil War era, and the policies of that time are quite different from those today; it's a similar case with the Democrats, who also happened to be have different policies from nowadays during that era.

Even then (on a different note), the Thirteenth Amendment was the statute that actually freed the slaves.