I lingered all day Monday over Sam Dealey's column chiding Save Darfur for over-stating the numbers of dead in Darfur. In An Atrocity that Needs No Exaggeration, Time Magazine reporter Dealey cites several reasons why such an overstatement would be a problem. (Save Darfur was sued by pro-Sudanese business leaders in the UK over the use of a mortality statistic about double what the majority of experts agree is the number of victims in Darfur.) These reasons include:

Exaggerated death tolls also make it difficult for relief organizations to deliver their services. Khartoum considers the inflated numbers to be evidence that all groups that deliver aid to Darfur are actually adjuncts of the activist groups that the regime considers its enemies, and thus finds justification for delaying visas, refusing to allow shipments of supplies and otherwise putting obstacles in the way of aid delivery.

Lastly, mortality one-upmanship by advocacy groups threatens to inure the public to both current and future catastrophes. If 400,000 becomes the de facto benchmark for action, other bloody conflicts around the globe — in Sri Lanka, Colombia, Somalia — seem to pale in comparison. Ultimately, the inflated claims fuel a death race in which aid and action are based not on facts but on which advocacy group yells the loudest.

It was at this point that I found Dealey's piece most persuasive. Catastrophe fatigue is a real problem for activism organizations. We have a sky-rocketing trend of hysteria, crisis, and death along with statistics to make each bad thing seem worse than the one before. Americans are battered by this in their email inboxes, and by other escalating tragedies in their newspapers and on their television screens. Dealey's concern is that we're artificially creating an ever-rising hysteria-baseline where we don't really get concerned unless something feels bigger and more catastrophic than anything else.

Still, I didn't love the tone he took with his column. It seemed more righteous than it needed to be, and did surely overstate the potential impact of Save Darfur using a number which though at the highest end of estimates, was still inside the range of estimates of the dead in Darfur. I decided not to write about it.

Then today's letters to the editors made me rethink my decision. Lili Arkin writes that Khartoum hardly bothers with excuses when thwarting aid efforts, so the idea that Save Darfur's high number somehow played in to this is moot. Further, she writes that Sam Dealey's claim "that the Save Darfur Coalition’s use of 400,000 dead in its advertising “hampered aid-delivery groups, discredited American policy makers and diplomats and harmed efforts to respond to future humanitarian crises” is surely a much more inflated and damaging claim than anything stated by the Save Darfur Coalition."

Meanwhile, Richard Brightman of Minnesota notes that Minneapolis's recent bridge collapse has received hundreds of hours of press coverage when the loss of life -- huge to the victims and their families -- is still less than 15. Brightman concludes "So excuse me, Mr. Dealey, if I have trouble accepting Khartoum’s being upset that the number of deaths resulting from their policies is not 400,000, but 200,000. You would take humanity out of this human tragedy that by any number must be stopped."

These letter writers helped me clarify the uneasiness I was feeling reading Dealey's piece. There are lots of critiques I'll gladly offer about the way advocates do their work and communicate with their constituency. I do have concerns about the way genocide opponents find themselves comparing death statistics as if to say, "my genocide is worse than yours." Genocide is genocide. Let's work together to find a way to end it.