At this point in a discussion one would have to dissolve the word "country" and ask what properties of Dubai are important to the discussion.

I never intended to enter the discussion in the first place; my original comment was parenthetical. I was simply pointing out a verifiable, objective, yet quite possibly tangential matter of fact that some participants (or readers) may have been unaware of.

Whether Dubai is a country or a part of a country is not a question that there's any ambiguity about. It's not a subject of dispute, as in the case of e.g. Taiwan. It's a simple matter of looking the answer up in Wikipedia. If you want to question the answer you find there, fine, but then you have to question the notion of "country" in general, and acknowledge that you're doing so, otherwise you're not being intellectually honest.