CAIRO, Egypt – The Iraqi minister who investigated American military abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 says American soldiers must stay in Iraq to defeat the “forces of obscurantist terrorism.”

Bakhtiar al-Amin, a former human rights minister who now sits on the board of the Foundation for the Future, said in an interview that he is generally supportive of the Iraqi prime minister’s national reconciliation plan, though he has yet to read all of the details. But Mr. Amin said he thought any discussion of a premature withdrawal of troops would be like handing “a declaration of victory for the forces of obscurantist terrorism.”

He added, “I don’t think any Americans who have a conscience and are reasonable would like to see our country defeated in that way. Iraqis have paid a heavy price and American soldiers have paid a price so far as well. After all of this investment, to give Iraq to terrorist forces would be a catastrophe.”

While Prime Minister al-Maliki’s unity plan contains no fixed deadline for the exit of American forces from Iraq, it does call for the reduction of troops and their eventual exit. In the last week, some Shiite leaders, including Muqtada al-Sadr, have used their Friday sermons to call on American soldiers to leave Iraq.

Mr. Maliki’s plan also gives broad amnesty to many insurgents, even those who have launched attacks on American soldiers, closely following the formula for amnesty put forth last November in an Arab League-sponsored summit in Cairo.

Mr. Amin said that as a general rule he supports an amnesty for insurgents and a truth and reconciliation process. This approach has had some success in post-apartheid South Africa and in several Eastern European countries after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Mr. Amin not only led Iraq’s investigation into Abu Ghraib but negotiated the first set of reforms of the American run prisons and an agreement that would eventually require America to hand over the infamous Saddam Hussein-era prison to Iraq’s government. Before the fall of Saddam, Mr. Amin, a Kurd, worked on raising international awareness of Iraq’s human rights abuses, particularly against the Kurdish population. In 1988 he launched one of the first campaigns to bring war crimes charges against the Iraqi dictator, after it emerged that Iraqi forces had used chemical weapons against civilians in Halabja.

In his interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Amin emphasized that Saddam’s crimes did not justify the American soldiers’ human rights violations. “You have great people in the American Army. They are people who represent American democratic values and human rights. And just like everywhere else, you also have some jerks. Those jerks are not representative of America or the Army’s values,” he said.

Mr. Amin noted, however, that the international response is disproportionate when American soldiers commit human rights violations. “In 1998, Saddam Hussein executed 2,000 prisoners after a few of them were asking for an extra blanket. At the time, we could not get anyone in the West to write about these young prisoners. They just disappeared and no one talked about it or wrote about it,” he said. “So when people in the West talk about Abu Ghraib and other atrocities after Saddam – and they should talk about [them] – I ask where they were when leaders in the West were saying, ‘Saddam is a man with whom we can do business,’ when they rolled out the red carpet for this man. There were many people who benefited from the impoverishment and oppression of my people, of the Iraqi people. They lived like parasites.”

Mr. Amin also noted the hypocrisy of the Arab leaders who have railed against the American abuses at Abu Ghraib. “The Americans acknowledged these mistakes and apologized. But have they ever opened the prisons of this region to international organizations or the international media? Have you ever even heard of a leader in this part of the world apologize for their prisons?” he said.

The Iraqi prime minister began a tour of the Gulf countries this week, asking them to crack down on the financing of terrorists in his country and to contribute to Iraq’s economy. Meanwhile, two female Iraqi legislators demanded yesterday that Mr. Maliki address in parliament allegations that a U.S. Army private raped a woman in the Iraqi town of Mahmoudiya and killed her family.