See in my opinion the WMD’s were the #1 issue. On Dec. 30, 2002, IAEA inspectors monitoring 8,000 spent fuel rods were kicked out of North Korea. So North Korea wasn’t exactly cooperating with inspectors either. The fact that Saddam wasn’t cooperating wasn’t a good enough reason to go to war because at least the inspectors did have some freedom of movement where as in North Korea among other countries weren’t cooperating at all. You can also argue that North Korea and other countries who aren’t cooperating with the world community have human rights violations as well.