Idled professionals such as Haisi say party members of discredited regimes elsewhere seldom face such harsh treatment. Communist Party members kept their jobs throughout Eastern Europe after the end of communism, and ousted parties survived in most countries to run in democratic elections.
The challenge for Allawi's government, analysts say, is to find constructive roles for those who worked in positions of authority under Hussein but haven't yet drifted into the ranks of extremists. Even U.S. officials now acknowledge that cutting Baathists out of postwar Iraq was counterproductive.
But there is another challenge.
"We won't work for the occupiers and we won't work for the current ministers because they are collaborators with the Americans," said Mohammed Salah Azawi, a former major in the Iraqi army who worked at a rocket engineering plant and served as a Baath Party division leader. He now earns about one-fifth his prewar salary under the pension program designed to discourage demobilized soldiers from joining the insurgency.
"If the Americans don't leave and the new government doesn't do as promised, all Iraqis will fight against them," Azawi said.
Former Baathists insist that they joined the party to serve the country or further their careers, not for Hussein.
Mahmoud Azuedi, a journalism professor rehired last month, joined the party when he was 16 because, he said, that was what anyone with academic aspirations did in the late 1960s.
"There is nothing wrong with the [party's] ideology. It was the way it was corrupted that was wrong," said the 51-year-old, who said he had exhausted his savings and borrowed from relatives to keep his wife and three daughters clothed and fed during his 15 months of unemployment.
Azuedi said he understood the feelings of helplessness and rejection motivating some former Baathists to sympathize with the insurgents.
Officials agree that they must do more to win over former Baathists.
"If we can't solve this problem, we won't be able to do anything in Iraq. This is an important part of national reconciliation," Hassani, the industry minister, said of the push to rehire Baathists "whose hands have not been dirtied with the blood of Iraqi people."
