The quickest answer to the division between them and us, as summoned by Mr. Bush, is that the New York firefighter acted in fulfillment of his official training, which taught duty transcending risk. The Afghan bomber was not fired by official training in the illusion of an Islamic empire. That is not the training to which millions of young Muslims around the world are subjected. That is why the president could speak of a "perverted" vision of Islam and of a "radical" Islamic empire.
The suicide bomber is enacting a masturbatory vision of himself as a cog in an enterprise that is nowhere set in hard theological language authorizing, let alone enjoining, him to kill himself and whoever else is in range of the explosive he detonates. There is not a single sentence in accepted Muslim doctrine that commends, let alone encourages, suicide action entailing the destruction of bystanders, although there are, among renegade sects, leaders who urge precisely that.
Mr. Bush cannot expect victory defined as an end to every Islamist who is prepared to engage in what many decades ago was defined as the "anarchic passion to smash." We have a sacred mission to contend against radical Islamism, but we cannot inoculate all young Muslims against such idealistic corruption as threatened Christianity in its early centuries.
It suits our purpose, and conforms with reality, to distinguish insistently the actions of the suicide killers from the faith of Muhammad. It is jarring that there were people in the Mideast who cheered the accomplishments of the 9/11 killers, but we had then a spectacle brought on by human perversion. It's true that perversion does sometimes bring cheers, and that the war against human sin will never be won. About those problems Mr. Bush can do nothing.