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Two years ago, Britain helped lash together a sprawl of Asian real estate into a federation called Malaysia. It was born in the high hope of providing economic unity, political stability, and a bulwark against expansion by Red China or Indonesia. But there was a fatal flaw that doomed the scheme from the start. Last week Singapore, fifth largest port in the world, broke away, and once again a British-backed regional federation was in tatters.- The flaw was a clash of peoples, of religions, of languages, of cultures. Put in the simplest terms, the Malays—largely rural, uneducated and unenterprising...