Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez speaks during a rally in Maracay on July 1, 2012.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins)

Death has a way of canonizing even the worst scoundrels. But Hugo Chavez, the recently departed president of Venezuela, is one of those unique, almost ahistorical figures who polarizes, even in repose.

If you are an American foreign policy official or buy in to the Washington consensus, you view Chavez through the dichotomy of stability versus instability. Was he, fundamentally, a "stable force for the region?" In Washington, the world is broken up into regions largely dictated by the geography of the Cold War bureaucracy. Washington prizes stability above all else because stability does not impede the free flow of commerce or upset the balance of powers or force the U.S. to shift its resources. The verdict is clear: he was not. Forget his anti-American posturing. He was fundamentally destabilizing. (Mike Rogers, the House intelligence committee chairman, used that exact phrase today.)

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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.