The most widely recognized case of blowback was provoked by Bremer’s first major act, the firing of approximately 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers. “De-Baathification,” as it was called, was supposedly driven by a desire to clean out the government of Saddam loyalists. No doubt that was part of the motivation, but it does not explain the scale of the layoffs or how deeply they savaged the public sector as a whole, punishing workers who were not high-level officials.
