Canary in the Coalmine.

Charts: The S&P 500 timidly inched above the final Fibonacci retracement number of 1333. Chartists will want to see at least 4 days above 1333 to say that resistance has been breached.

Long War: Israel says that Iran is sending two warships through the Suez Canal. Egypt says that it has heard nothing of the sort from Iran and warships can't sail through the canal without Egypt's permission. Denying Iran permission to transit the canal will create a firestorm of protest. Iran may be poking at the treaty between Israel and Egypt. Iran understands how vital that treaty is to global US hegemony.
Hamas has formally asked the Egyptian Army to lift the blockade of Gaza. It too is poking at the Egypt/Israeli treaty. The Egyptian Army responded by sending extra troops to the Sinai and it did so after consulting with Israel. Egypt cannot send extra troops to the borderland without Israel's permission according to the treaty. So this is a good sign.
The Jasmine Revolution has hit Hamas pretty hard. It is cracking down on demonstrators who are demanding an election. Hamas says there will be no election. Meanwhile, Hamas' more democratic rival, Fatah, in the West Bank, is in fact scheduling new elections. And Hamas has its hands full in another way. Rival Gaza terror group Islamic Jihad continues to fire mortar shells into Israel. Hamas is not ready for a full scale conflict with Israel so it is hunting down Islamic Jihad fighters and trying to curb them.
Egyptian intellectuals are printing article after article criticizing the Gaza blockade, so far to no effect. The blockade is indeed the canary in the coalmine and we must pay close attention to it.
The bigger picture is this: The coming election in Egypt is equivalent to the 1948 election in Italy. Without massive CIA involvement, the 1948 election would have been easily won by the Italian Communist Party, which back then was a total puppet of the Kremlin and bent on creating a Soviet-style dictatorship. The CIA actually created the Christian Democrat political movement, which dominates European politics today. Angela Merkel of Germany is a Christian Democrat, for instance. The CIA made sure the good guys won the 1948 election and continued rigging southern European elections into the 1960s. It created modern European democracy.
The CIA is certainly stretched thin. There were CIA fingerprints in the Sudanese election, which went well. But since then Arab jihadist tribesmen have killed over 200 South Sudanese civilians. In the months and years ahead there will be several elections in Long War hot spots. It is up to the CIA to make sure that the good guys win.