You write: “The principal U.S. contribution to the Darfur aid effort is food and funds to transport it.”

This may be true, but it is important to see how these contributions have changed since the SDC has become more influential.

Public IRS records show that after a couple of years of operation, the SDC hired 2 lobbyists to push for legislative changes in Congress. They advocated for resolutions that were focused on military intervention, sanctions and violence prevention. But they could have focused more on humanitarian assistance, especially since the rate of violence, according to the CRED report, had dropped significantly after the 8 April, 2004 ceasefire and since the death-rate due to disease and malnutrition remained relatively high during the time these resolutions were being considered.

An analysis of the government’s spending provides some interesting insight. Before the SDC hired lobbyists to advocate for a greater emphasis on military intervention, the United States government had sent a total of $1.01 billion dollars to Darfur since the war began. $839 million dollars (83 percent) was allocated to refugee camps and humanitarian assistance, while $175 million dollars (17 percent) was allocated to funding peace-keeping activities. These numbers indicate that the United States government was initially more focused on providing humanitarian aid than it was on funding peace-keeping activities.

From 2006 until 2008, the allocation of funds shifted dramatically from humanitarian aid to peace-keeping, presumably due to the influence of the Save Darfur lobbyists. Of the $2.01 billion dollars that was spent on peacekeeping and humanitarian aid during this period, $980 million (48.7 percent) was spent on funding peace-keeping missions, while $1.03 billion (51.3 percent) was spent on humanitarian aid. This indicates that there was a significant proportional increase in the amount of aid allocated to peacekeeping, while there was a significant proportional decrease in the amount of aid allocated to humanitarian projects.

These proportional changes don’t make sense in the context of the CRED report, which shows that violence, after April of 2004, was much less the cause of deaths in Darfur than disease and malnutrition.