To be explicit about something I wasn't explicit about in my other reply:

The set {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Dubai} is "wrong", for the same reason that {plane, train, boat, driver's-seat-of-car} is

Again, I disagree; it's a useful set for practical purposes

There is an ambiguity here, but if what you are claiming to disagree with is the analogy to {plane, train, boat, driver's-seat-of-car} (as opposed to merely the "wrongness" of either), then you genuinely do not have a good understanding of, or are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge, the relevant political geography, and I would suspect you of having heard of Dubai before you had heard of the UAE (probably as a result of journalists' ignorance), and anchoring on this fact.

But I can't be sure to what extent we really have differing models of how the world works, as opposed to at least one of us going out of our way to signal something (willingness to disregard official politics in your case, familiarity with the Middle East in mine).

I am having a hard time understanding your motivation for vigorously defending ignorance of the UAE's existence from my attempt to correct it. As far as I can tell, you're worried that someone who thought Dubai was a country and knew that alcohol was legal there might, upon learning the indisputably true fact that Dubai is inside a country called the UAE, conclude that alcohol was legal in the rest of the UAE also -- apparently on the assumption that products cannot be banned at any lower level of government than the national, in any country in the world. But anyone who makes such an assumption is likely to be suffering from a model of governance too fundamentally broken for this discussion to even matter to them. Furthermore, it's hard to imagine how a situation where someone practically benefited from ignorance of the UAE's existence would even arise. After all, it would be unlikely for a foreigner to end up in Dubai without learning about the UAE in the very process of getting there. (If, as a result of this discovery, they hatched a plan to take alcohol from Dubai to some other emirate where it wasn't legal, perhaps they would have been better off not knowing that the latter was in the same country; but it would be too late.)

Given this, I really don't understand what the harm is in educating people about the existence of the UAE in a context like this, a discussion of hypothetical geopolitics on a sophisticated website. I didn't even claim the fact was terribly important; the parentheses in my original comment were intended to be the functional equivalent of labeling the comment a "nitpick". I do think that it is the kind of fact that readers of this site ought to know, if they don't already. It's not as if the cost of learning it were high.

A quick look suggests India and UAE are the only other countries where alcohol is banned in some regions but not others, as opposed to over a dozen countries with national bans.

This is once again tangential, but what matters here is not whether policy contingently happens to be uniform throughout a country (because all localities agree on the correct policy), but whether the uniformity necessarily holds because localities don't have the power to make their own policy. For example, the fact that alcohol is legal throughout Australia is presumably a mere consequence of the fact that none of the states or territories have chosen to ban it, even though they theoretically could if they wished. (EDIT: Actually, Australia does have dry zones, though this seems to refer to public or outdoor consumption.) It goes without saying that alcohol policy variations are not limited to outright bans; for instance, in the Netherlands, it is apparently true that

Drinking in public places is not banned by national law, but many cities and towns prohibit possession of an open container of an alcoholic beverage in a public place

(emphasis added). The point here is that practically-important policy is very often made at non-national levels of government, all throughout the world.