It depends on which institutions and what you trust them to do. Talking about the intelligence institutions, the CIA and the UN weapons inspectors, those institutions provided correct information that Bush chose to ignore.

So were the intelligence institutions trustworthy to provide good information? Yes.

Bush did an end-run around them.

Were they able to stop the U.S. from going to war? No. But that was Congress’s (and maybe the US media’s) job and certainly _those_ institutions failed.