At first I thought it's because of Coriolis, but then someone told me that at the bathtub scale that's not the predominant force in this phenomenon.
Answer
The whirl is due to the net angular momentum the water has before it starts draining, which is pretty much random.
If the circulation were due to Coriolis forces, the water would always drain in the same direction, but I did the experiment with my sink just now and observed the water to spin different directions on different trials.
The Coriolis force is proportional to the velocity of the water and the angular velocity of Earth. Earth's angular velocity is $2\pi/24\ {\rm hours}$, or about $10^{-4}\ s^{-1}$. If water's velocity as it drains is $v$ the Coriolis acceleration is about $10^{-4} v\ s^{-1}$.
The water moves about a meter while draining, which takes a time $1\ m/v$, so the total velocity imparted by Coriolis forces could be at most $10^{-4} v\ s^{-1} * 1\ m/v = 10^{-4} \ m/s$.
So the Coriolis effect is quite a small effect. But this first-order Coriolis effect does not cause the water to rotate.
The direction of Coriolis force depends on your direction of motion. All the water in your tub is moving the same direction, so the Coriolis force pushes it all the same direction. The effect is that if the bathtub starts out perfectly flat and begins draining (and it points north), all the water will get pushed east. The two edges of the tub will have very slightly different depths of water, because the Coriolis force is pushing sideways.
The Coriolis force could create "spinning" on uniformly-moving water, but only as a second-order effect. As you move away from the equator, the Coriolis force changes. This change in the Coriolis force is because the angle between "north" and the angular velocity vector of Earth changes as you move around; as you go further north (in the Northern Hemisphere) the "north" direction gets closer and closer to making a right angle with the angular velocity vector, so the Coriolis force increases in strength. The size of this effect would be proportional to the ratio of the size of your tub to the radius of Earth. That ratio is $10^{-7}$, so this effect is completely negligible.
The Coriolis force could also create some "spinning" if different parts of the water are moving different speeds. If the tub is draining to the north in the northern hemisphere, and water near the drain is moving faster than water far away, then the water near the drain would be pushed east more than water far away is. If you subtracted out the average effect of the Coriolis force, what remained would be an easterly push near the drain and a westerly push far away. This gives a clockwise spin as viewed from above.
We've already estimated the typical velocities as $\omega L$, so the angular momentum per unit mass induced this way would be on the order of $\omega L^2$ (but maybe smaller by a factor of 10). That's only $10^{-4}\ m^2/s$. To get an equivalent effect, in a tub of $100\ L$, you could give just one liter of water on the edge of the pool a velocity of a few cm/s, something you surely do many time over when removing your body from the tub.
This effect is too small to affect your bathtub, but it's still observable under the right conditions. According to Wikipedia, Otto Tumlirz conducted several experiments in the early 20th century that demonstrated the effects of the Coriolis forces on a draining tub of water. The tub was allowed to settle for 24 hours in a controlled environment before the experiment began. This was enough to damp out the residual angular momentum left over from filling the tub up to the point where Coriolis effects were dominant.
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