BAGHDAD — America is pressing Iraq’s parliament to guarantee Saddam Hussein’s top security officials and militia leaders equivalent posts in the government that has replaced his tyranny.

The outgoing American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, presented the chairman of the Iraqi de-Baathification commission, Ahmad Chalabi, with what is being wryly called a “parting gift” — draft changes to what the embassy calls the Accountability and Reconciliation Law.

Mr. Chalabi told The New York Sun that the draft American proposal would cause an “uproar.” He made his remarks during an interview at his summer estate in Baghdad’s Hurriya neighborhood, under the shade of recently built guard towers and some of the city’s tallest date palms.

“It would have guaranteed positions for the Fedayeen Saddam,” Mr. Chalabi said, referring to the militia that fought American troops when Iraq’s army splintered and that formed the original insurgency with al Qaeda.

“The fourth article of this proposal says under this new law, all members of Saddam’s security services, special republican guards, general security service, Fedayeen Saddam will be entitled to the equivalent positions in the new government,” he said.

De-Baathification remains a thorny issue for Shiite lawmakers, not to mention the leading Shiite religious authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who have resisted earlier pressure from the minority Sunni politicians to remove restrictions that bar the highest level Baathists from resuming their posts in the new government.

The issue is also a hot one in Washington, where Democratic leaders in Congress have made the reform of the lustration procedures a benchmark the Iraqi government must meet as a condition for the receipt of funds and training for their national army, not to mention the presence of American soldiers.

Senate Democrats are expected this week to include a requirement to change the de-Baathification procedures in the supplemental military funding bill. The president has promised to veto the bill because it contains a timeline for withdrawing soldiers.

Mr. Chalabi thinks the Democrats for the most part are ill-informed. “None of the Democratic leaders who come here, who talk about de-Baathification with such expertise, ever talk to the de-Baathification commission,” he said. “We have 500 members of the commission. Some of them are pretty competent.”

Mr. Chalabi’s critics accuse him of using the commission to extract leverage from rival politicians. Nonetheless, Mr. Chalabi’s position has softened on purging the old regime leaders from the new government. In late 2005, he announced that the commission would be relaxing many of its old rules.

Yesterday he said that a common misconception is that the commission purged all Baathists. “The number of Baathists or those associated with the Baath was about 1.4 million people. After we took on the de-Baathification process, the ones subject to any action were 38,000.” The 38,000, according to Mr. Chalabi represented those members of the old party who had ascended to the fourth level or “furqa,” an echelon that often required Iraqis to have at least collaborated with the regime on fellow citizens, or higher. “They had to do some bad things,” Mr. Chalabi said.

Mr. Chalabi yesterday said that of the 38,000 people originally targeted for de-Baathification, a full 32,000 are now eligible for their old pensions, including the pension checks they missed since the fall of the regime. Also, the level four Baathists are eligible for exemptions to return to their old jobs. So far, according to Mr. Chalabi, approximately 2,500 people have requested and have been granted their old pensions, and more than 14,000 people asked for exemptions to return to government jobs. “Almost all could go back to their jobs,” Mr. Chalabi said. As an example he pointed out that the Iraqi army commander in charge of the Baghdad security plan was a former level four Baathist. “We work with him,” he said. “We think he’s a good guy.”

Mr. Chalabi said he signed a letter last month that would also grant pensions and back pay to the senior officer corps of the Iraqi army that was dissolved in 2003 by the chief of the coalition provisional authority at the time, Paul Bremer.

At issue, Mr. Chalabi said were the remaining 6,000 former Baathists who ranked higher than the level four members of the party. Mr. Chalabi said, for example, that he expected the level three Baathists under most reform proposals to also be eligible for pensions, but not automatic exemptions to return to their jobs. As for the top echelon of Baathists, which Mr. Chalabi estimates at 2,000 people, he says, “They are out of it.”