> Boggled my mind as a kid in history class that the Republicans somehow wanted to free slaves in the past but are all in on bombing the crap out of iraq

It's Christian universalism in both cases. Your average person in the midwest--descendants of people who volunteered for the Union Army at disproportionate rates despite being fresh immigrants with no horse in the race--thought that Saddam Hussain was a comic book villain holding Iraqis hostage and that, if he was overthrown, Iraq would become a democracy like Iowa. They couldn't conceive of a society where a brutal secular dictator was a local optimum.