NEWS ANALYSIS : Haitians Harbor Mixed Feelings Over U.S. Efforts : Diplomacy: As Clinton prepares to hand off mission to U.N., islanders lament crime and unemployment.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti —  President Clinton will arrive today to mark the end of the major U.S. military presence here and will be greeted by a still-thankful nation, but one increasingly convinced that U.S. policy is to blame for Haiti’s growing lawlessness and a brutal economic crisis.

Clinton will officially turn over to the United Nations responsibility for following through on policies that began Sept. 19, when 20,000 U.S. troops arrived to remove the Haitian army from power and to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Officials say Clinton will use his 11-hour stay to point to the U.S. role here as a major foreign policy triumph of his Administration, accomplished at relatively low cost and despite congressional and popular opposition in the United States.

There is no question that the U.S. successes are real:

* Aristide is back in power, returning three years after he was ousted by a military revolt.

* The cruel and corrupt military has been effectively eliminated.

* A crushing international embargo has been lifted.

* An economic recovery plan has been launched.

All these steps have given Haiti what U.S. Embassy spokesman Stanley Schrager calls “a window of opportunity to enter the modern, democratic world.”

It was also accomplished, he said, “with amazingly low casualties”--one American soldier has been killed and one wounded by hostile forces, while three others committed suicide.

One of Aristide’s senior officials agreed.

“There was virtually no bloodshed, the people still welcome the U.S. troops, the (Haitian) army has disappeared, and Aristide has dispelled American concerns about his politics and behavior,” he said.

*

Even the oft-criticized U.S. policy of a limited, incomplete confiscation of arms from known Aristide enemies has had a positive effect, Aristide aides say.

“There hasn’t been enough disarming,” one Aristide associate said, “but it destroyed the ability of anyone to stage a coup” against the government.

Despite these accepted accomplishments, Haiti is in the midst of an expanding period of self-doubt, skepticism and outright fear. It has Haitian officials and influential private citizens here wondering if the promise of the U.S. intervention will be realized any time soon. These doubts center on what is perceived as a lack of law and order and a dire economic situation that seriously threatens the survival of not only Aristide but the viable Haitian nation.

That is a paradox to close Aristide aides. The very basis for Clinton’s pride--the elimination of the Haitian military regime and restoration of Aristide, without a long-term or deep U.S. involvement in internal matters--is the root of this nation’s plight now and in the future, they say.

“It was a limited mission to begin with,” one official said, “and it was so narrowly interpreted that it ignores the ultimate problems that have always threatened stability and order here.”

In the long run, a senior Aristide official argued, “the real problem here, due to American inaction, is the lack of jobs. There is a perception of an unwillingness by the Americans” to undertake or immediately finance projects that will create permanent, well-paying jobs.

This is most acute in terms of jobs that would result from rebuilding the infrastructure.

Haiti’s road system is impassable to all but the strongest vehicles; its phone system reaches less than 5% of the population and it seldom works; the electrical grid is in such bad shape that getting four hours of power each day is considered a godsend.

“It is really frustrating to the people,” the senior Aristide official said. “The Americans brought the equipment. The people saw the equipment and then the equipment left” without one new road built or an old one repaired.

U.S. officials acknowledged machinery was brought in, but it was for use only in constructing and maintaining U.S. military facilities.

“Building roads was not part of the mission,” one official said. “That is the responsibility of the Haitian government when they get international aid.”

While the lack of jobs is seen by the Aristide government and U.S. officials here as the single greatest threat to Haitian democracy and stability, a more immediate problem all but obsesses residents of this country: crime.

There is an almost universal belief here that Haiti is being engulfed by a lawlessness that makes it even more dangerous and unstable than it was in three years of brutal military rule.

“There have been more murders in Port-au-Prince alone since September than in all of Haiti in 1994 before the invasion,” an American security expert said.

He joined with other officials in noting that Haiti now lacks a police force, a judicial system and adequate prisons.

“What makes this so troubling,” the expert said, “is that the American army could put an end to the crime right now, this minute. But they decided it wasn’t their role to be policemen, and Haiti is suffering.”

*

In Washington, the senior commander responsible for the U.S. forces acknowledged the persistence of a crime problem. But he insisted that it is not as bad as the Pentagon had once anticipated.

“I think that what you really need to focus on is just how peaceful it has been, as opposed to what we were originally projecting six months ago,” Gen. John J. Sheehan, head of the U.S. Atlantic Command, told a news conference at the Pentagon.

“There’s been an average of about two deaths a day in Haiti,” he said. “Most of those are economic violence, some vigilante violence. But I am very hopeful that, if everyone does his part, the leadership of Haiti, the people of Haiti, the multinational force of the U.N. and the emerging police capability--then I think you’ll see a downswing in the level of violence in Haiti.”

Perhaps--but the popular conviction that Haiti is chaotic was reinforced Tuesday with the assassination of Mireille Durocher, a leading Aristide opponent and an official in the former military regime. She was killed in daylight on a busy street. U.S. military police say her killing was well planned and done by professionals.

*

Two Americans also fell victim to violence when the couple, missionaries Mark and Teresa Jacobsen, were shot during a robbery in their home late Tuesday in the southern town of Bossier. They were in stable condition and recovering Thursday.

Aristide officials blame some of the disorder on the U.S. troops, who have declined to act as a Haitian police force or as construction workers to rebuild this nation; the Americans have done this not because of issues in Haiti but because of political concerns in the United States and past policies and failures.

Influential business people and even U.S. diplomats say the American policy was determined by experiences completely unrelated to Haiti.

“This (U.S.) army fights its last war in any new conflict,” one U.S. official said, “and we have been re-fighting Somalia here. The whole military approach has been to avoid repeating what went on in Somalia.”

He referred to the U.S. role in the African nation, which began in 1992 in limited fashion, with the goal of assisting international efforts to fight a famine.

But it evolved into a more ambitious plan to re-establish law and order and to take part in “nation building.” This plan proved costly, leading to more than 40 American casualties. U.S. forces were scaled down and finally removed last year.

The Somalia experience, U.S. officials acknowledge, led American military leaders to insist on a quick, very limited presence in Haiti. The U.S. forces, which exceeded 20,000 troops in late September, now number less than 5,000 and will be reduced to 2,400 under U.N. command.

While the force was steadily cut, U.S. policy against involvement in local affairs--what was dubbed “mission creep”--was so strictly interpreted by U.S. commanders that troops were ordered to prevent crimes only if they took place in their presence or endangered soldiers.

Along with refusing to act as police, U.S. troops declined to take part in any but the most limited programs to improve Haiti’s shattered infrastructure.

That is to occur in the next 18 months under a development program financed by $1.2 billion in pledges from various nations and international agencies; it includes $200 million from the United States.

But very little of that sum has actually been delivered, and there is little to show for what has been allocated.

“If the jobs and infrastructure problems aren’t met,” one U.S. official said, “this whole thing could collapse and what we’ve accomplished won’t count for anything.”

Times staff writer Stanley Meisler in Washington contributed to this report.