For more than 2,000 years, the narrow Strait of Malacca has been among the busiest shipping routes in the world, a shallow corridor, bedeviled by shifting sandbars, between East and West. At the southern entrance to the Strait, several hundred yards off the tip, of the Malay Peninsula and several leagues above the equator, lies a diamond-shaped island, roughly 30 miles across. The island has no natural resources. Its name, Singapore, means "city of the lion" in Malay, but there are n...