Everybody expected them. They haven't materialized.

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal is only the latest in a long string of calamities you can blame on the Bush administration's stubborn refusal to prepare beforehand for the postwar occupation of Iraq. But the United States and the international community were very well-prepared for one crisis that never occurred: a massive outflow of refugees from Iraq to other countries.

Refugees had streamed out of Iraq during the first Gulf War, and it was assumed the same thing would happen in the second. The United Nations predicted that a million and a half Iraqis, constituting roughly 6 percentof the population, would leave Iraq. Anticipating a crisis, the State Department allocated tens of millions of dollars so aid officials could be positioned along Iraq's borders with food, clothes, tents, stoves, and blankets. The war certainly dislocated many Iraqis from one part of Iraq to another, and to this day millions of Iraqis, by staying in Iraq, risk death, starvation, and untreatable illness due to insufficient medical care. Nonetheless, the war and subsequent occupation have not propelled many refugees out of the country.

Iraq's refugee crisis suffers from a deplorable shortage of refugees. Why are there so few?

Part of this question is easy to answer: The war was mercifully short, and mostly fought outside heavily populated areas. Moreover, as James Fallows noted a few months back in the Atlantic, the Bush administration's expectation of a refugee crisis was premised largely on the belief that once the war started, Saddam would let fly chemical and biological weapons—weapons that, we now know, he didn't have.

Inevitably, the war did create some refugees; in the immediate aftermath, Human Rights Watch reported that 1,500 Iraqis had fled to Jordan. No doubt there was emigration to other countries as well. There has been considerable movement within Iraq, chiefly by Arabs displaced from Kirkuk by Kurds (who, under Saddam, were displaced by the Arabs) and by Palestinians driven out of Baghdad by Shiites (a problem that has received little attention in the press; for more on this, click here). But "[t]he war in Iraq caused no massive displacement," according to the "Iraq Emergency" Web page of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees:

Despite the many difficulties facing Iraq's 25 million residents in the immediate aftermath of the war, most people appear ready to wait out this phase and look towards a new, vibrant post-war Iraq.

The deeper mystery is why this has remained so during the much more violent and chaotic "postwar" occupation.

Hawks will tell you it's because the reconstruction of Iraq has been an unacknowledged triumph. "In the ancient land that America liberated, life is more beautiful and hopeful than it has been in many decades," Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby crowed last month. "Bush's foes may loudly deny it, but the refugees streaming homeward know better." It's a logical conclusion to draw (though Jacoby ought to note that some of those huddled masses migrating into Iraq are motivated by the desire to kill American soldiers).

But doves can just as easily argue that Iraqis derive their relative contentment and optimism for the future from a belief that they will soon drive those interfering American infidels, with their condescending lectures about secular democracy and their shameful promotion of sexual license, out of Iraq altogether. An early withdrawal could leave central Iraq in the hands of the Baathist thugs who just chased American forces out of Fallujah, and southern Iraq in the hands of radical Islamists. If Iraqis view these prospects with equanimity, then the already-shaky justification for going to war is even shakier.

Bored with his own speculation on the matter and suspecting the answer lay beyond the realm of pure ideology, Chatterbox asked a few experts what they thought. Their answers were not as comprehensive as Chatterbox wished for, but they did have the virtue of being informed. They cited: